


Lost in the Echo Part III

by flamethrower



Series: Re-Entry: Journey of the Whills [43]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst and Feels, Dammit Mace, F/F, GFY, M/M, clone feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-05
Updated: 2015-06-05
Packaged: 2018-04-03 01:20:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4081027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flamethrower/pseuds/flamethrower
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Pretty violent thing to like, though, isn’t it?  For a Jedi, I mean.”</p><p>“If I judged the value of things by how violent they were, I wouldn’t have any friends to speak of,” Kenobi replied.  “The litanies are about war, yes, but they’re also about life, about connection.”</p><p>Rex had to give him that one.  “Vode an.”</p><p>“That is one hell of a pun right now.  A double pun, even.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lost in the Echo Part III

**Author's Note:**

> *Pay close attention to the dates within the fic. There are flashbacks stacked in with current events.*
> 
> Beta credit to Norcumi, who has done a lot of happy shrieking in the past couple of days.
> 
> Note the second: I know Season 2 of Rebels might blow some of this out of the water, but I've pretty much decided that NONE OF THEM ARE ALLOWED TO DIE. *hides characters from Filoni and hisses*
> 
> Major character Death note: No, I didn't kill any of them, either.

Republic Date 5212: 9/3rd

Dentrentu VII Medical Station, Outer Rim

Month 4 of the Outer Rim Sieges

 

Mace Windu was not in the habit of making mistakes. He knew himself to be cynical at times, and untrusting, which was why he often chose caution over immediate action. He owned his decisions once they were made, and refused to regret them except for those rare times in his life when he had made the wrong choice.

Standing over the still body of one frail-seeming Padawan, Mace knew he had made a grave mistake, one that would require yet more sacrifice to rectify.

He eyed the monitors, which showed the Padawan’s suppressed life signs as well as her almost nonexistent brain activity. “Will she recover?”

“The Padawan took a plasma wound to Padawan’s physical core, Master,” the Healer on station told him, after taking the time to compose her words. Basic was not Healer Uru’s first language. “If not for Padawan’s species, Padawan would be dead already.”

“That did not answer my question, Healer.”

Uru flattened her cranial ridge. “The Padawan is comatose. Padawan could wake up tomorrow, or not at all.”

Mace reached out to touch Ahsoka’s hand. The argumentative, stubborn Padawan did not respond to him, neither physically or in the Force. Her awareness was so subsumed by quiet that she seemed departed already. Only physical contact had proven to him that she still had a presence left to her at all.

Comatose meant many things, but what Mace was most concerned about was Tano’s safety. Thirteen years ago, a young Padawan had killed a Sith, but had walked away unscathed—the Council had placed their trust in this, and in the Force, to keep him safe from further Sith incursions. As of this moment, Ahsoka Tano had no such ability to defend herself.

Mace forced himself to move away. There was a lounge several doors down from the shielded recovery room. Mace stayed on the wrong side of the glass doors, observing.

Obi-Wan was sitting upright in a chair, head tilted back against the wall. His eyes were closed, his mouth slightly open. He was asleep or unconscious; Mace couldn’t tell. The younger Master looked like seven different shades of Sith hells, and that was probably being kind. “He did not receive treatment for his injuries?”

Uru snorted. “The Master said Padawan was first, only priority. The Master will live, but Master will not be happy when time to re-break Master’s arm.”

“Ah.” Mace’s eyes flickered down to Skywalker. The Knight’s head was pillowed on his Master’s leg, and he’d stretched out along the bench seat with his long legs hanging off the end of it. He didn’t look as physically damaged as his Master, but he was just as deeply asleep. Both Jedi were radiating their own little black hole of exhaustion, pain, and anguish.

“Shit,” Mace whispered. He’d already decided on a course of action, and it was not a kind one. He didn’t know what Skywalker’s reaction was going to be, but Obi-Wan had been vociferously against their decision to send Tano out into Separatist space as a disenfranchised spy.

If or when the truth came out, Mace would consider himself fortunate to escape Obi-Wan with his teeth intact.

“You’re certain they are not aware that Tano survived the surgery.”

Uru eyed him. “They were both asleep when the surgery was complete, and none wished to wake the Master or the Knight to tell them about the Padawan. They do not know, but they will when they wake. The Knight and the Padawan are well-bonded.”

Mace closed his eyes. He’d never trusted Skywalker. Maybe he never would, but then, he trusted very few, even among those seated on the Council. He’d spoken out against the Skywalker/Tano pairing, and had been relieved to find his reservations repeated by Obi-Wan, but they had both been overruled. To find that they were indeed well-matched, enough to have a strong training bond…

 _So I am proven wrong twice over in a single day,_ Mace thought, and forced himself to turn away from the doors. Perhaps he was wrong about this, too, but at least all three of them would be alive later to give him grief for it.

“Healer, I will need your assistance in a careful unwinding of Padawan Tano’s bond with her Master.”

Uru’s crest flared high. “Master will explain that request immediately, or Master will become the dinner of my nest mates, no matter Master’s status.”

“Healer, we are about to perform the necessary act of faking a young Padawan’s death in order to secure her safety from the Sith,” Mace said bluntly, “until such time that Tano is recovered enough to defend herself from any plot that might endanger her.”

Uru’s tongue flickered out, scenting the air. More than likely, she was ensuring for herself that Mace spoke the truth. “Master believes that other Sith will try to kill Padawan.”

“I do.” Mace glanced back at the sleeping Jedi. “Darth Maul might have stabbed her with his lightsaber, but Tano eviscerated him and caused his death before succumbing to her own injuries. I have absolutely no doubt that Tano’s life is in grave danger.”

“The Master and the Knight would protect Padawan with all of their skill,” Uru told him.

“That they would, and if it were not war time, I would let them do so.” Mace gave up on decorum and rubbed his face with his hand. “But I can’t do that. The Republic needs them back on the front lines, right now, or more lives than Padawan Tano’s may be lost.”

 

Imperial Year 27: 1/21st

Alliance-observed Old Republic Date 5239

The Warren, Lothal

 

“Boss, the Imperials are going ballistic.”

Obi-Wan glanced up from the wound he was rebinding on Black’s arm. “Come again?”

Turkey grimaced at the sight of raw flesh. “Oh, ugh. Isn’t that healed yet, Black?”

Black shook his head. “Shattered bone, Turkey. Answer Ben’s question, I want to know what the hell’s going on.”

“The Imperials are losing their shit,” Turkey repeated, after tearing her eyes away from the wound. “Next time, don’t get shot.”

“Fuck you, too,” Black muttered.

Obi-Wan sealed the bandages with a waterproofing spray. He hoped he’d been able to do enough Force healing to make a difference, or Black was going to be sniping one-armed for the duration of the war. “Any particular reason why? We haven’t actually done anything to them today.”

“They intercepted a coded transmission, one that wasn’t meant for them.” Turkey shifted her rifle from her right shoulder to her left. “Sources inside the Academy Garrison say the Imps can’t decode it, but they know it’s an Alliance encryption. Colonel Druhl is apparently panicked about the idea that there’s an actual Alliance operative on Lothal soil.”

“Well, that took a year longer than I expected it to,” Obi-Wan muttered, and stood up. “Stay here, Black,” he said, when the Greene sibling tried to follow him. “You’re still on bed rest.”

“There’s not a damn thing wrong with my legs,” Black protested.

“Do you want your arm to heal or not?” Obi-Wan countered. “Stay.” He followed Turkey out of the warren’s medical area. “Tell me that we intercepted it, too.”

Turkey grinned. “I thought that went without saying.”

Obi-Wan collected Mara on the way to the warren’s comm center. When Mara could be pried away from her role as bodyguard, she spent her time with Silver Greene, much to Obi-Wan’s amusement.

“Do I need to give you a sexual safety lecture?” Obi-Wan teased her in a quiet voice, unheard over the usual din of people living and working in the tunnels.

Mara’s eyes narrowed. “No.”

“Are you sure? It’s commonly expected of teaching Masters.”

Mara turned and gave him a cold glare that could have frozen lava. Obi-Wan smiled back, undaunted. Maybe his current student was supposed to be revenge on behalf of everyone who had ever dealt with his prickly temper, but if so, it was revenge that he was enjoying immensely.

Viffax was waiting for them, arms crossed over his chest. The Aqualish was one of the least talkative communications experts Obi-Wan had ever met, but he was a consummate professional the moment he was on duty. _“Chagganga ghullo.”_

“Good morning,” Obi-Wan replied. “Show me what you intercepted, please.”

“It’s this one,” Viffax said in Basic, bringing up the encrypted text on a cracked viewscreen. There was only one screen in the collection that was intact, but as long as they could read text and make out images, Viffax didn’t care, and Obi-Wan didn’t either. “I’ve already run it through basic decryption algorithms, but the Imps would do that, too, and I didn’t have any better luck than they did.”

“No, none of that will work. People have been trying to decode this without the key for years, and they haven’t managed it yet. Move over,” Obi-Wan requested, and rested his hands on the keypad after Viffax vacated his seat.

“How do you know that?” Mara asked.

“Because I wrote it while stone-blind drunk,” Obi-Wan said, and began entering the decryption key. It was slower going than he expected, but then, it had been a while since he’d used it last.

“Are you in the habit of writing unbreakable encryptions?” Viffax asked.

Obi-Wan shook his head. “No encryption is unbreakable. I actually wrote hundreds over the years, but there are only four left that haven’t been decrypted by Imperial Intelligence.”

“Let me guess.” Mara had crossed her arms in unconscious imitation of Viffax. “You were drunk when you wrote the other three, too.”

“It’s a distinct possibility.”

“So, there really is an Alliance operative on Lothal?” Turkey asked.

“No. Well, not officially,” Obi-Wan amended.

Viffax grumbled something in Aqualish that was probably vile cursing. “Why not officially?”

“They think I’m dead.” Obi-Wan paused in his typing, uncertain whether he’d just botched the decryption. He double-checked what he’d entered so far and then resumed, hoping he hadn’t fucked it up. “Someone in the Alliance must have caught the rumor of one of those names in particular.”

“Cypher wasn’t just a terrible nickname, then,” Mara said, her lips thinning as she tried not to smile.

“No, I had another genuinely terrible nickname.” Obi-Wan sighed in relief when the message accepted the key. “Cypher didn’t talk to many people, so there is a very short list of potential contacts. The only person in the Alliance who actually knew my true identity is dead.”

“ _Dechuk?_ ”

Obi-Wan glanced at Viffax. “Alderaan.”

“Oh,” Turkey said, while Viffax resorted back to pure Aqualish and made one of his planet’s religious gestures against evil. Mara’s expression hardened into the grim resolve she always seemed to have lately whenever Imperial war crimes were mentioned.

The decoded message appeared on-screen, sparing him from potentially unpleasant conversation. “There we go.”

[Rumors of Cypher on Lothal. Confirm. Fulcrum.]

Viffax grunted, unimpressed with the sender’s terseness. “Who’s Fulcrum?”

If Obi-Wan had been dropped into the situation cold, it would have taken him a while to dredge up that information, but he’d been reviewing his knowledge of names and contacts from that era of his life for a while now. “Another Alliance agent. We’ve never met, but we talked a few times via encoded text messages. I recoded data for them before sending it on to the next agent in the line.” That agent had typically been Bail, who at least had been able to confirm Fulcrum as a trustworthy source. Obi-Wan hadn’t asked for anything else; the less he knew about other members of the Alliance, the better.

“How would you confirm?” Turkey asked.

“ _Are_ you going to confirm?” Mara countered. “It could be a trick.”

Obi-Wan nodded. “Possibly, but I’m not going to be responding with anything that would give us away—at least for the moment. There would be more than one confirmation step, and if it is Fulcrum…well, we are going to need assistance with that blockade.”

Mara’s smile was sharp-edged. “What, you aren’t going to take out the blockade by yourself?”

Obi-Wan gave her a look of polite disbelief. “No, I am not facing off against eleven Star Destroyers by myself. I like being alive,” he said, and then entered the response message into the terminal.

“Poetic,” Mara said.

“Scientifically accurate, thank you.” Obi-Wan smiled. “But yes, also poetic. I had to have some skill beyond stabbing things with a lightsaber.”

Mara raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“Well, I’m the dumb fuck who didn’t remember that it would be a good idea to have the Alpha Eight encryption in the system already, so I’m going to be sitting here and typing this up manually for the next three hours. Poetry just requires mastery of the language, not necessarily intelligence.”

Mara snickered, but then took pity on him. “I’ll bring your breakfast, since you probably haven’t remembered to eat it, yet.”

“I want my terminal back soon,” Viffax warned him.

“What do we do after the message goes out?” Turkey asked.

“We go back to driving Colonel Druhl mad.”

 

Imperial Year 27: 1/22nd

Alliance-observed Old Republic Date 5239

The Alliance Station _(Un)Classified Venture,_ Outer Rim

 

The straight razor was an antique, something he picked up on a backwater about a year into the first war. He’d used a field kit disposable before that, re-sharpening the cheap edge over and over again. Even tried the sonic cutters once, but that had been a fucking disaster that promised a close shave but tried to rip his face off, instead.

He was going to ignore the straight razor for the cost (fifty credits, the damned _nerve_ of that hack salesperson) until the General had talked him into it. “Things like this are worth the money. Better than sinking a small fortune into those useless disposables, anyway. The edge gets ragged as the metal thins. This will keep a better edge, and if you bleed on it, at least you’ll run less risk of infection.”

He’d touched the back of his head, self-conscious of the healing cut. “I didn’t know that you were so informed about razors, sir.”

“What, you think I was born with this beard?” General Kenobi had smirked at him, and then disappeared back into the crowd when Skywalker showed up and practically towed him away.

Rex was on his final pass with the razor when there was a discreet cough. “You take such damn care shaving your head, but you can’t be bothered to trim back that bush you insist upon growing on your face.”

He didn’t smile, if only because he’d learned that lesson when he was still a quickly-growing adolescent. You didn’t make faces of any sort while shaving unless you had a thing for bleeding. “Wolffe. Didn’t think you’d be back so soon.”

“Trip was a bust,” Wolffe said, walking over from the doorway to lean against the row of sinks.

 _I didn’t get to shoot anyone_ , Rex interpreted. “Sorry to hear that.”

“I did pick up some new rumors.”

“Lothal?” Rex activated the tap and washed the blade clean. At least he didn’t give a damn about a locker room’s lack of privacy. Some of the kids in the Alliance were a hell of a lot more particular.

“That is where they tend to come from of late,” Wolffe said, waiting patiently for Rex to towel his head dry. “You’re gonna love this.”

“Usually when you say that, I hate it.” Rex held out his hands; Wolffe threw his clothes at him. “Bastard.”

Wolffe grinned in a way that revealed all his teeth. The Shinies had all believed that the man’s name was a pack leader reference, at least until they saw Wolffe happy about something. “Get dressed, first. Don’t need you losing that towel you’re wearing when my new rumor knocks the wind out of you.”

When Rex came back a few minutes later, Wolffe was pulling faces at himself in the mirror. “You’re not going to get any better looking, so stop trying.”

Wolffe rolled his eyes. “You have no room to talk, brother.”

“Spill the rumor or go away.”

“Lothal is in active rebellion,” Wolffe said.

“Good for them. It’s been a while since their last attempt.” Rex tossed his towels into the laundry tube, and then added three more that some twit had left on the floor to molder. “A lot of planets are doing that of late. What makes Lothal special?”

“Well, we’ve got allies who will damn well want to know that their lost hope is giving it another go,” Wolffe replied.

Rex had to give him that one. The Spectres would definitely be interested.

“And, not all of those planets are rumored to have Jedi leading their uprisings,” Wolffe said.

“Skywalker?” The Alliance heads were confirming that the kid was Anakin’s son, but Rex wasn’t going to bite on that particular hook until he got to meet the man. He wouldn’t put it past the Alliance to find someone the right age, with the right kind of face, and pass him off as a hero’s offspring just for the political points.

Wolffe was shaking his head. “No, the powers that be are sitting on the kid after what happened on Mindor. Guess they realized that sending their only Jedi into battle all the time wasn’t the best idea.”

“Not if you want to keep your only Jedi,” Rex agreed. Jarrus, Bridger, and the Commander refused to confirm their status with High Command, and a big part of it was the risk factor. They’d all watched Command put Luke Skywalker through increasingly dangerous situations, wondering if the Alliance was set on making the Jedi extinct for real. “So, if it’s not the new kid, then who?”

“I don’t know, but there are two names that got out past the blockade. The first one I managed to confirm was Coy Val-Dar.”

“Coy Val-Dar,” Rex repeated, frowning. _“Cuy’val Dar.”_

Wolffe nodded. “Those who no longer exist.”

“Cute.” That paired up nicely with the Jedi rumor, at least. “What’s the other?”

 _“Tehkemiren Shus’huk,”_ Wolffe said. “The Mando’a use is a bit much, but I thought—Rex? What is it?”

“No fucking way,” Rex whispered, and realized only then that he had an iron grip on the edge of the sink.

“I said that you’d have the wind knocked out of you, but I wasn’t actually serious. Or am I missing a call sign?” Wolffe asked.

Rex had to swallow before he could answer. “You had only been out with General Koon for about a month, so you probably never heard it. We stopped using the term after the Commander joined up. Didn’t want to give her any bad ideas.”

Not that it had done any good. Commander Tano had taken after her Master with a vengeance. Skywalker had deserved it, but damn, none of them had wanted to babysit _three_ crazy Jedi. Bothawui had been bad enough the first time around, let alone the second.

 _“Tehkemiren Shus’huk_. We called General Kenobi that after the second Kello campaign.”

“The Walking Disaster.” There was a look of disbelief on Wolffe’s face. “You sure we’re talking about the same general?”

“You weren’t there to count how many times the General managed to get himself shot.” Rex finally convinced his hand to let go of the damned sink. “It has to be a coincidence.”

“That’s a pretty specific coincidence, Rex.”

“Yeah.” Rex rubbed at his face with both hands, feeling rough beard beneath his fingertips. “Let’s go see the Commander.”

“Thought you’d say that,” Wolffe said. “I’ve already got transport lined up.”

“I knew there was a reason I liked you best.”

 

Imperial Year 20: 12/30th

Alliance-observed Old Republic Date 5232

Outer Rim

 

Rex hated reports. That was one constant that had carried him through a war and then years of rebellion, and the more established the Alliance became, the worse it got. He was really not in the mood to justify dead Imperials. Apparently just writing, “Imperial” was not enough of a reason. Spoilsports.

“Hey.” Rex looked up from his pad to find his brother standing in the doorway. Wolffe looked haunted in a way that none of them had in years. It reminded him too damned much of Order 66’s aftermath.

“What’s wrong?”

“I took Wiru’s shift today.” Wolffe hesitated. “I was on duty when the dispatches were decoded.”

“We’ve got confirmation on Alderaan after all, huh?” Rex wasn’t terribly surprised, beyond the absolute _shock_ of it. Tarkin had always struck him as a cold-blooded bastard, but wiping out a densely populated Core world on what probably amounted to little more than a whim went right through cold-blooded and straight into complete evil.

Wolffe blinked a few times. “What—oh. Yeah. We got conformation of Alderaan, too. But there was something else, and I wanted you to hear it from me before the news spread.”

When Wolffe told him, there was a moment when the news simply did not sink in. Then Rex stood up, threw the table against the wall, and tried not to send everything else in the room after it. “FUCK!”

Wolffe eyed the table and its significant new dent. “Yeah, that’s about what I did. Pretty sure I’m banned from communications for the foreseeable future.”

Rex felt stinging pain in his hands. He unclenched his fists before his fingernails could gouge deeper holes in his palms. “Does the Commander know?”

“Not yet, the news just came in—where are you going?” Wolffe asked.

“To do the same thing for her that you just did for me,” Rex said, and then looked at his brother. “Thanks. For making sure it came from a friend.”

Wolffe nodded. “Want to go blow something up later?”

Rex clenched his jaw. That seemed petty, but it also sounded like a damned good idea. “It had better be something very big and very Imperial.”

“I’ll go find a good target, then.”

Rex found the Commander in a briefing with Wren. “Hey, Kid. Can you give us a minute?”

Wren smiled at him. “Sure. We were just about done, anyway.” She patted Rex’s shoulder on her way out. Rex took a brief moment to watch her leave. He was all but certain that she was the child of one of his brothers, but if so, Sabine Wren wouldn’t admit it.

“Rex.” Tano gave him an odd look. “Okay, spill. Is it news on Alderaan?”

“Alderaan’s a confirm,” Rex said, but Tano didn’t need to hear that. She’d felt it, just like Jarrus and Bridger had. Hells, Bridger had hit the floor screaming. He wasn’t going to be forgetting that sound anytime soon.

“For something we were pretty sure of already, you look like you’re about to be ill,” Tano said, shutting down the holographic projector she’d been using with Wren.

Ill. Yeah, that about defined the churning, sick feeling in his gut. “Base just got confirm. Obi-Wan’s dead.”

Tano just looked sad. “Rex, we already talked about this. We knew years ago that it was most likely true.”

“No, I mean.” Rex tasted bile and swallowed it back down. “The confirm is for two days ago. Aboard that monstrous fucking Death Star.”

Tano’s mouth fell open as her eyes widened. “Two days ago. He was—he was still here, until—” She pressed her hands over her mouth. “Stars,” she whispered, and tears slipped from her eyes.

“Dammit.” Rex sighed and hugged her, relieved when the Commander allowed it. Sometimes Tano couldn’t stand to be touched, and other days she craved it. He didn’t know if it was a Jedi thing, a Togrutan thing, or if something damned bad had happened that she would never confess to.

“I didn’t think we had anyone else left to grieve for, Rex,” she whispered.

“Yeah.” Rex’s eyes were burning, but he couldn’t cry, not yet. That would come later, when he committed mass property damage, got drunk, and went through another cycle of terrible godsdamned reminiscing with Wolffe. “The scrawny bastard couldn’t be bothered to come and see us, could he?”

Tano gave a watery laugh. “We didn’t leave a forwarding address, Rex.”

“That’ll teach us.”

She stepped back and looked at him. Some days it was still odd that they were the same height, if you discounted her montrals. “Are you okay?”

Rex shook his head. “No. Not at all.”

Tano nodded, probably expecting that answer. “Can I do anything?”

“Sign off on whatever Wolffe comes to you with,” Rex said, and managed a smile. “We’ll make certain some good comes out of it.”

Tano sighed. “Destroying Imperial targets won’t make you feel any better, Rex.”

“Yes, it will,” Rex said, but ultimately, it didn’t.

 

Imperial Year 27: 1/24th

Alliance-observed Old Republic Date 5239

 _The Ascendency_ , Outer Rim

 

Ahsoka Tano watched the stars from the viewport window, wanting to meditate in the worst way. It had been days since she’d been able to quiet her mind as she had once been taught. When it wasn’t her own disquiet preventing her from meditating, it was the demands of her role in the Alliance. A spy’s work was never done, especially when one was leading an entire group of sneaky people into space controlled by the Empire.

Thus, she watched the stars. Space was quiet when so much around her was loud. She held out hope that the faint starlight would help to soothe her thoughts.

_Decide you must, how to serve them best._

Ahsoka jerked awake with a start, aware only then that she had fallen asleep. “Master?” she whispered, and then chided herself for doing so. Master Yoda was long dead.

Some days she desperately missed the simplicity of Fulcrum’s comfortable anonymity. Crafting cells for the Alliance had been an uncomplicated role. Ahsoka had been an asset to her allies and death to her enemies, and there had been no in-between.

The Lothal Rebellion had forced her out into the open, at least among her fellow rebels. She retained her identity as Fulcrum among strangers, for her safety and the safety of those who were under her charge.

Given the way her mind wandered, it wasn’t much of a surprise when the door opened to admit one of those she vowed to protect. “I have here another high-priority message for the lovely Fulcrum,” her human guest said, dropping into a swooping bow as he held out the folded ’plast missive. He meant it to be a courtly gesture, but he’d never been taught, and thus he just looked sort of ridiculous.

Being sort of ridiculous was part of Ezra Bridger’s charm.

“That’s the eighth one this month.” Ahsoka took the message from Ezra’s hand, shaking her head. “You need a new delivery, Bridger. That one’s getting worn.”

Ezra straightened up and then raised both arms in an expansive shrug. “I ran out of new and interesting ways to deliver messages about six years ago. I know a brothel variant, but Kanan and Sabine both said no on pain of neutering.”

“That’s because they’re smart.” Ahsoka broke the seal on the missive. There wasn’t much of a need for secrecy among the members of their small rebel cell, but everyone still granted Ahsoka the courtesy of not reading her mail before she could.

She wanted to rejoin the primary Alliance group, or at least bring her group in from the cold of Imperial space for a time. So far, the answer from Command was a firm refusal. The purpose that her cell served was vital. They were not just spies, but couriers, passing along intelligence that would gain the Alliance further victories.

It was just so gods-cursed boring of late, and that mindset was exactly why Ahsoka wanted her people to have some downtime. They got shot at more often than not, and that was not supposed to be dull.

“Boredom there is not,” Ahsoka muttered under her breath, and looked at the message.

[Fulcrum is the pivot point upon which the balance rests.]

Ahsoka stared at the printed text, her heart fluttering a little in her chest. “It came in like this. You’re absolutely certain it came in exactly like this.”

“No, because I’m not a slicer,” Ezra said. His façade of irresponsibility fell away like a stone. “I’ll bet it’s exact, though—it was Wistori on slicing duty tonight.”

Ahsoka blew out a calming breath. “Where are the rest of the Spectres?”

“Uh—Hera and Kanan are pulling that escort mission you gave them,” Ezra said. Ahsoka nodded; it wasn’t every day that an Imperial general defected, and her team had been tapped to retrieve his family from deep within Imperial territory. “Oh, and Zeb got bored, so he’s in Bay Seventeen shooting at Chopper.”

Ahsoka stared at Ezra.

“What? They’re just stun beams, and it’s not like Chopper isn’t shooting back,” Ezra protested.

Ahsoka did not sigh, especially when it would be misinterpreted by the younger Jedi. It was not frustration, but nostalgia that bit at her with its dull fangs. Skyguy and R2-D2 had never resorted to shooting at each other, but Zeb and Ezra’s relationship with the C1 droid still reminded her far too much of her old Master.

“Sabine’s in my bunk, or she was. She might have gone back to her bunk.” Ezra rubbed the back of his neck. Honestly, if Ahsoka hadn’t seen him at work, she would consider the man to be the worst operative ever.

“Still can’t figure out if you’re in a relationship or not, huh?” Ahsoka asked, failing to keep a smile off of her face. Ezra Bridger would have been censured by the Council by now for having a relationship when he was not quite officially a Jedi Knight. Kanan Jarrus would have faced the same.

The Council would have been wrong. They’d been wrong about a lot of things.

“I think it’s not an official Mandalorian relationship until she stabs me in my sleep,” Ezra grumbled.

“As long as she doesn’t aim for your heart,” Ahsoka said lightly, and then grinned at Ezra’s long-suffering look. “I’m sure it’s fine. Sabine will tell you if it’s not, you know that.”

“Yeah.” Ezra straightened his shoulders. “You want me to call the others in?”

“Don’t pull Jarrus and Syndulla until their mission is complete, but then yes, call everyone in. Tell Orrelios and Wren that I want them to stay local. Once everyone has returned, I’ll brief you on what’s happening.”

“Please tell me that the Empire is dead, and we don’t have to run from Star Destroyers anymore.”

 _That would be nice,_ Ahsoka thought. “It appears that someone has restarted the Lothal Rebellion.”

Ezra’s eyes lit up. He’d been so attached to his homeworld. Being forced to leave, and then _stay_ away, had always grieved him. “If you’ve got news of confirmed rebellion, that means they’re succeeding.”

Ahsoka folded the message along its original crease, and then ran her fingertips along the edges to reseal it. “Yes. I think they are.”

 

*          *          *          *

 

Ahsoka had no idea how he managed it, but Rex and Wolffe turned up well before Kanan and Hera were due to return. “Heard there’s news,” Rex said, dropping down into the seat opposite hers.

She looked up from the dejarik game she’d been playing with Chopper. The droid cheated, the little shit, but at least it was entertaining cheating. “What news?” she asked in an innocent tone.

Wolffe snorted and took up position across from the doorway. “Did that voice ever fool anybody, Commander?” There was nothing subtle about the way his hand rested on his blaster, but Wolffe had been overly cautious about open doors since an ambush had nearly wiped out the entire cell.

“Not really,” Ahsoka admitted, thinking of the knowing look in Anakin’s eyes whenever she’d tried to convince him that no, she really hadn’t just done something foolish. It was the second time in as many days that she’d gone melancholy over Skyguy. That was a bad habit to get into; she couldn’t afford to wallow in things long since lost.

“The news about Lothal, specifically.” Rex programmed in Ahsoka’s next move without being asked. It was worth it when Chopper’s head spun around as the droid squawked in outrage about being thwarted. “Heard there’s a rebellion forming.”

“It formed, and it’s active. I’m calling in the original Lothal group, in case we’re about to see Lothal’s liberation,” Ahsoka said, while Chopper blatted about revenge. “I won’t say no to the extra guns, but it’s a fact-finding mission, not a battle.”

“There’s Imps and there’s a revolt. Of course there’s going to be a battle,” Wolffe retorted, unconvinced. “You don’t normally play it so naïve, Commander.”

“And if they do succeed, there’s still the blockade to deal with.” Rex programmed a string of moves into the game to counter Chopper. Ahsoka let him; she didn’t actually like the game very much, but Rex and Wolffe were capable of making Chopper all but short circuit in rage. The droid hated to lose.

“Why are you here?” Ahsoka asked. “Especially since I imagine that you two didn’t ask permission.”

Wolffe smiled. “There are some damned good advantages to staying out of the command structure, Tano.”

Rex finished programming in Chopper’s defeat and then looked up at her. His face had weathered and his hair had gone white, but his eyes were as sharp as ever. “We also heard a rumor that there was a Jedi fronting the Lothal rebellion. Thought maybe that was also why you were going in.”

“It’s probably nothing,” Ahsoka said, as Chopper managed to get one of his holo-creatures to eat Rex’s strongest piece. The droid blew an electronic raspberry that Rex pretended to ignore. “I would imagine it’s just leftover from when Jedi _did_ begin the first Lothal rebellion.”

Rex scrubbed at his thick beard. Ahsoka often wished he would shave it off. She liked the familiarity of his face, and the beard destroyed the planes of his features. It also reminded her that Rex and Wolffe were still aging at twice the speed of a normal human. They’d lived only thirty-eight years, but Rex and Wolffe were physically seventy-six—humans well into middle age.

When they had first met, it had seemed novel that she was older than Rex. Now it was just monumentally unfair.

“I don’t think it’s the old rumor,” Rex said finally. “I think this is something new.”

“Intuition?” Ahsoka asked, trying not to hold her breath. Rex wasn’t a Jedi, and technically, neither was she, but the man’s instincts were fine-honed from years of war and hardship.

Rex shrugged. “I don’t know if we’re going to find a real Jedi on Lothal, but someone’s going to an awful lot of trouble to make the Empire think there is.”

Ahsoka didn’t frown, but it was a close thing. Rex hadn’t lied, but he was a lot more upset by the situation than he was letting on. “Rex. Wolffe. What did you hear?”

“No.” Rex shook his head. “I’m sitting on this one until we know more.”

Ahsoka crossed her arms. “No, you’re not, Captain.”

Rex just smiled at her. “I’m not a captain anymore, Commander.”

 

*          *          *          *

 

It was several days of waiting before Jarrus and Syndulla were due to make it back to base. Since base was a converted dreadnaught hiding out in deep space, away from well-traveled space lanes, there wasn’t much to do aside from pace the ship and think. Thinking usually led to remembering, and Force, but that was something Rex would really prefer to avoid for the time being.

He slammed his fist into a bulkhead, and then swore when the only result was reddened, bone-bruised knuckles. He needed something else to do, but Ahsoka had locked him out of the firing range after the second day.

It was just as well. There were ghosts there, too.

_“Come on, then. You keep saying our weapons aren’t civilized. We just want to know why, sir,” Cody said. It would take one of the brothers to know that the commander was smirking, the expression was so faint._

_Rex shrugged when General Kenobi looked to him. “I won’t turn down an answer, sir.” Skywalker was the first Jedi to actually bother answering Rex’s questions, and this was Skywalker’s Master. He wanted to know if respect was part of Skywalker’s particular brand of individualism, or if it was a trait that Kenobi shared._

_Kenobi was shaking his head. “What’s so civilized about war? What’s so fucking civilized about killing people?”_

_Cody laughed at him when Rex flinched at the unexpected swearing. “You’re gonna have to get used to that, Captain. The General here has a mouth on him.”_

_“Not always,” Kenobi said._

_Cody gave him a disbelieving look._

_“Just because I know how to behave in public…” Kenobi narrowed his eyes. “Give me your rifle, Cody.”_

_“Knew that would work, sir,” Cody said, cheerfully handing over his weapon. Rex felt his hands tighten on his rifle in reflex. It would take a hell of a lot more than that to get him to sacrifice his primary firearm, commanding officer or not. “Rex, your age is showing.”_

_“It isn’t,” Rex said, but he made his hand relax._

_Kenobi lifted his arm and fired at the target without actually turning to face it. The rifle barked until the target on the far side of the range emitted a gout of flame from the center as it overheated from the repeated pinpoint blasts._

_“Kriffing hells,” Rex muttered under his breath._

_“Peripheral vision, sir?” Cody asked, accepting his rifle back after Kenobi pulled the spent charge._

_“No.” Kenobi smiled. “I didn’t need to look.”_

_Rex looked at the target, which was being sprayed down by maintenance droids to keep the fire from spreading. “That’s, uh. That’s incredible, sir.”_

_“No, it’s fucking uncivilized,” Kenobi replied. “That is why I don’t carry anything but a lightsaber.”_

_“What if the situation itself was uncivilized, sir?” Rex asked._

_“Well, that would be different, wouldn’t it?” Kenobi countered._

“If you hit the bulkhead again, it’s going to develop sentience and hit back just to get you to knock it the hell off,” Wolffe told him.

Rex grinned at his approaching brother. “Well, then it would be a challenge, wouldn’t it?”

“You don’t need that kind of challenge. You’re too damn old.”

“Look who’s talking.” Rex leaned against the wall as Wolffe stepped back, giving enough clearance for a half-squad of pilots to pass through the corridor. “What do you want, Wolffe?”

“You need to talk about it, so I want you to talk about it _before_ we go to Lothal. I want you on your toes and capable of dealing with whatever we find,” Wolffe said.

Rex glared at him. “You don’t outrank me anymore, Commander.”

“I didn’t outrank you before, I was just older.” Wolffe smiled. “I’m not saying that shit as a commander, I’m saying it as your brother. With Gregor dead, you’re the only family I’ve got left.”

Gregor was another sore topic, one that Rex wanted to discuss even less than a dead Jedi Master. Wolffe knew it, too, the bastard. “You know what the best-kept secret in the whole of the 501st and the 212th was?”

Wolffe raised an eyebrow. “Wasn’t that Skywalker and his girlfriend?”

“No, that was the _worst_ kept secret,” Rex said. “We all knew about Skywalker and the Senator, we just kept our mouths shut. They only remembered to keep things under wraps if they were on Coruscant. No, this was…” He trailed off, not wanting to discuss this in a public corridor. The walls really did have electronic ears.

Wolffe got the hint, and found an empty bunk room they could lock themselves into. “All right, spill.”

Rex waited until they both checked the room for listening devices, and then announced, “I might have broken about half the regulations the Republic army had about fraternization within the ranks.”

“I’m shocked,” Wolffe said, placing his hands over his heart. “The man who said to me, ‘Fuck this, I’m defecting,’ when Order 66 came down, breaking regulations? I never thought I’d live to see the day.”

“Hey, fuck you. Do you want to hear this or not?”

Wolffe sat down on a steel bunk and rested his elbow on the rolled-up mattress. “I’m listening, brother.”

“The first time the 501st went out, we didn’t have Skywalker. We had General Natangnu. He was one of those assholes who thought we were meat clankers, and treated us like it, too. Bastard got a third of my company in medical or dead, so when he got himself killed in battle and this skinny blond-haired Padawan took over the legion, none of us protested. The kids tended to be a bit more open-minded, you know?”

Wolffe nodded, grief shadowing his eyes. “I remember.”

“Commander Skywalker claimed us, even though the Padawans weren’t supposed to have command over entire battle groups.” Rex smiled at the memory. “He was sleep-deprived, so his conversation with Kenobi and Gallia was…pretty obstinate.”

_“That stupid fuck—”_

_“That was a Jedi Master, Padawan.”_

_“Fine. That stupid_ Jedi Master _almost put an entire legion into the ground. Screw that. These men are mine. I do not give a shit if I’m just a Commander. No. Mine.”_

_“They did get results, Master Gallia.”_

_“The Council does not have a problem with Padawan Skywalker assuming temporary command of the 501 st, provided that he treats them better than Master Natangnu did.”_

_“I could shoot half of them and I would still be doing a better job than that stupid fuck.”_

_“Padawan!”_

That was Rex’s audio introduction to General Kenobi. Rex hadn’t been sure what to expect, but Kenobi was remarkably tolerant of Skywalker. Maybe they’d luck out a second time, and he said as much to his lieutenants when they’d asked how it went.

“We should be so fortunate,” King muttered.

“Shut up,” Attie said. “I for one am all about welcoming our insane new Jedi Commander.”

By the time Skywalker was given orders to join the 212th for the potential culmination of the Pernellian Campaign, King was dead, and Rex was promoting another brother into yet another empty lieutenant’s position. That wasn’t even supposed to be his job, but Commander Bell had gone down their first week out, and Natangnu had gotten their first line-up of lieutenants killed. When Rex had picked up Bell’s comm and started barking orders to keep the situation under control, no one had protested, and now _everyone_ in the 501 st looked to him. It made him uncomfortable as all hell, but Rex figured that as long as he was keeping his brothers alive, he could put up with the discomfort.

Torrent Company and the rest of the legion went with Skywalker. It appeared the Commander was very serious about claiming them, since he kept dragging the 501st all over inhabited space.

The first time Rex met General Kenobi face-to-face, all the brothers were standing in formation in the _Valiant’s_ hangar bay _._ Cody came out first, helmet tucked under one arm. “Rex.”

“Cody.” Rex glanced at the hall where his brother had come from, but no Jedi yet. “Tell me that your General isn’t another Natangnu.” He would regret those words later, when they met General Krell. That bastard would all but prove Natangnu to be a kriffing saint.

“Not hardly,” Cody said, just before another brother announced commanding officers on the deck. Rex stood at attention while Cody took his place next to him, which was damned weird.

“You’re 7th Sky, why are you standing in for the 212th’s command?” Rex asked.

“Because he’s dead, and somehow I’ve been running both for three weeks.” Cody grimaced. “There’s probably a promotion coming down the line.”

“Lucky you.”

Cody frowned and lowered his voice. “They really need to promote you, too, if you’re going to hold the 501st together. Fucking Captain, I swear to all the little gods.”

“Shut up. I don’t want to be in the running to get shot at as often as you do,” Rex hissed back, and then there were the Jedi. Skywalker was practically glowing as he introduced General Kenobi to the legion.

Natangnu, General Tii, and Commander Skywalker had set the expectation that all Jedi came in size too-damned-tall, but Kenobi wasn’t much taller than Rex and his brothers.

“Captain Rex,” Kenobi said, his accent all but pure Coruscanti. “Not Commander?”

“I told him he needs a promotion, sir,” Cody offered.

“And I told him I didn’t want to get shot at more often, General Kenobi,” Rex added, because he was damned if he was going to put Shoot Me stripes on his armor.

“Wise man,” Kenobi said, and then he was off again, meeting the rest of the arrivals. Rex was still caught on vibrant red-gold hair and blue eyes.

To distract himself, he asked Cody, “Who’s this Dax Kello?”

“An asshole,” Cody said.

“Aren’t all the Sep commanders in that category?”

“Oh, this one’s a special asshole,” Cody groused, “or else we would have killed this prick a month ago.”

“So, like Durge, Ventress, Dooku, Loathsom, and the rest of the higher ups,” Rex said. He honestly wondered some days if the CIS made their generals change their kriffing names for their supposed intimidation value.

Cody’s mouth twisted. “Honestly, I think Durge is a hell of a lot less annoying.”

Rex wound up in a fighter, after all, along with half the company, heading out as soon as Cody gave the order from the bridge. The plan went well, the blockade of the Pernellian got cleaned up, and Cody came to find him afterwards with a bottle and the intention of getting completely plastered.

“Long day?” Rex asked, after chasing his lieutenants out of his room. Rank had its privileges, even if he didn’t actually have the rank yet.

“I am not dealing well with the fact that I watched my commanding officer topple over on the bridge looking half-dead,” Cody snapped.

Rex held up his hands in conciliation. “Drinking it is, then.”

It wasn’t long before Rex decided he approved of Cody’s General. Kenobi was like Skywalker; if a brother told him his name, Kenobi didn’t forget it, and he _used_ it. Natangnu had always resorted to rank, claiming names were too difficult to remember when everyone looked alike.

Cody quietly lost his shit when Jabiim went down. It was bad enough to slog through that mess, all of them—the whole of the 212th, most of the 501st, and entire contingents of ARC troopers. Jabiim was a rainy, muddy, complete fucking disaster from start to finish, made worse when General Kenobi was reported KIA.

Cody held onto his temper once they were spaceside, and only swore in private when General Mundi claimed the 212th _and_ Commander Skywalker. Rex hated that General Kenobi was gone, but at the time, he’d been a hell of a lot more worried that Mundi was going to order the 501 st reassigned to a new Jedi.

Skywalker would never say what he did to convince Mundi to let the 501st stay. Not that it mattered—the Commander gave a damn about Rex and his brothers, and he proved it every single day they went out to court death via clanker.

Over a month later, Skywalker almost went AWOL, convinced Kenobi was alive.

“Look, I am _talking to him_ , dead men don’t talk in my head!”

Rex side-eyed his commander, secretly thinking that he probably hadn’t made the best argument. He had his doubts, but Cody didn’t, and that was enough for Rex to stand with them both and all but bully General Mundi into heading out to Rattatak.

Kenobi and Alpha-17 were waiting to meet them. Neither of them looked all that healthy, or all that happy. “You’re all right, Master?” the Commander asked.

“Never better,” Kenobi replied, flashing a bright smile. “If we leave now, I’ll be even happier.”

“Uh huh,” Skywalker said, and gave Mundi such an I-told-you-so glare that Rex had to grin. Thank the stars for bucket helms.

“We need to secure the planet, Obi-Wan,” Mundi said. “Feel free to sit out the process in orbit.”

“Thank you,” Kenobi replied. “Alpha?”

“You go. If any of Ventress’s troops are still around, I want the chance to thank them for their hospitality.” Kenobi nodded at the ARC trooper and went on to the transport.

Skywalker gave the retreating general a suspicious glower, and then rounded on Alpha. “How is he _really?_ ”

“He spent the ten-day in medical,” Alpha said, and Skywalker grimaced. “But he’s walking out of here, so I’d say it’s not near as bad as it could have been.”

They called it the Rattatak Retrieval, since it wasn’t quite a rescue when those you’re rescuing have already saved themselves. Rex had a feeling that Kenobi was glossing over a hell of a lot, but Alpha had been locked in a separate facility, and didn’t know much more than what the General had told him. What reassured him was Skywalker’s narrow-eyed awareness that Kenobi was lying through his teeth about being fine. Skywalker kept an eye on him, which was good, since Kenobi never went on leave and the war never stopped. That, and Kenobi sure didn’t fight like someone who really needed to be benched.

Actually, Kenobi fought like a scary damned nightmare brought to life. Rex’s Mandalorian genetics really appreciated the ferocity, but he was also aware that Rattatak had loosened something in the Jedi Master that wasn’t in the mood to lie back down and be quiet. Skywalker was intense, but Skywalker was intense all the time, like he didn’t know how to stop. Kenobi was pleasant and cheerful until someone pushed him too far, which made the emotional swap jarring as hell.

The _Valiant_ went down two weeks after the Retrieval. Rex thought Skywalker swore a lot when he was exhausted, but after the _Valiant’s_ loss, he _really_ understood where the trait came from. Skywalker was damned near angelic compared to some of the gutter language that had poured out of the General’s mouth at full volume.

Rex pulled midnight patrol duty for the new capital ship’s shakedown cruise. He could have claimed rank and handed it over to someone else, but he always got restless in the middle of a ship’s false night cycle. Might as well walk it out and let another brother sleep.

That was how he came across Kenobi, sitting on a crate in the aft hangar bay a little after first hour. They didn’t speak, though the General gave him a nod of acknowledgement as Rex passed by.

Their second night on the _Negotiator,_ he found the General leaning against a corridor wall, datapad in hand and scowling. “General.”

“Captain.”

Third night, it was the mess, and a greeting exchanged over the bad, bad caff that the droids kept trying to pass off on them. Rex knew decent caff, and the commissary droids couldn’t seem to figure it out to save their metallic asses.

Fourth night, it was meditation in the port observation lounge. Rex didn’t interrupt, but he was really starting to wonder if the General slept at all.

On the eighth night, Rex found Kenobi sitting in a maintenance area and staring at a wall, blank eyed. Kriffing hells, he knew that look. He had no idea that a Jedi was susceptible to battle breakdown. Dammit, what did you do for a Jedi suffering from breakdown if they weren’t sensible enough to take themselves off-duty?

The empty look in Kenobi’s eyes finally prompted him to ask, “Do you ever sleep?”

Kenobi blinked a few times and then looked up at him. “No. Not in weeks.”

Shit. Rex hadn’t expected brutal honesty, either. “Then how are you still upright? Sir,” he remembered to add.

“Meditation,” Kenobi answered, and then sighed. “I’m fine, Captain.”

Rex had already been in the field long enough to help men under his command deal with battle breakdown, and he didn’t debate very long before he decided that a sleep-deprived General was not to his taste. He held out his hand, and glared when Kenobi just gave it a look of puzzlement. “Get up. Come on.”

For a minute, he thought the General was going to pull the stubborn card and order him to go the hell away. Then Kenobi sighed and let Rex pull him to his feet. He didn’t say a word as Rex led Kenobi to the general’s quarters, though there was a brief flash in his eyes that looked like full bore panic after they got inside.

“No, not—” Rex clenched his jaw. He was no famous diplomat, but he suspected words would gain him nothing more than a shove out the door and a General that still wasn’t sleeping. He shoved Kenobi down on the bed, then knelt to pull off the man’s boots. He shucked his armor down to his blacks, then pressed Kenobi down on the shipboard mattress, curling up around him.

“You’re safe,” Rex said in a low voice. Kenobi flinched but didn’t pull away. “You aren’t alone.”

He knew he’d made the right call, regs be damned, when Kenobi gradually relaxed against him. It should have been Skywalker doing this, but he’d noticed that Kenobi and Skywalker, much as they loved each other, couldn’t communicate worth a damn unless they were out stabbing droids.

“No, we really can’t,” Kenobi murmured.

_Am I that loud?_

Kenobi’s headshake was the barest movement of his head, but his hair still tickled Rex’s nose. “It’s proximity. Can’t help it.”

Screw that. They’d covered mental shielding in basic, given that Rex and his brothers were all meant for the Jedi. He wasn’t that great at walls, but he knew he _was_ good at subsuming his thoughts in washouts of color.

 _Lovely_ , Rex heard, and then Kenobi was still and quiet for the rest of the ship’s night cycle.

“Did you sleep?” he asked bluntly, after the terminal chrono had blared its announcement about sixth hour.

“Not really,” Kenobi answered, but he didn’t sound certain. Rex decided to take it as a good sign. Wakeful bedrest was still better than wandering the ship’s halls like a ghost.

Then Kenobi looked at him, smiling. “Thank you, Captain.”

“You’re welcome, General,” Rex replied, understanding the subtle message about being back on duty. He gathered up his gear and headed out, and was halfway down the hall to make sure everyone else was awake before he realized that he hadn’t stopped dwelling on Kenobi’s smile, and the way it put a shine back in his eyes.

 _Aw, hells,_ he thought, disheartened. _I did not just develop a crush on a man capable of ordering me to my death._

Rex was less than pleased the second time he had to convince the General to sleep, several days later. (No one had slept in the meantime. Damn Seps.) Kenobi was a shaking wreck for the entire night cycle. Rex wound up holding him, which was how he learned that the General was a sneaky bastard. He was so damned thin, not healthy by anyone’s standards. Rattatak was definitely worse than Kenobi had admitted.

Rex resorted to Mando’a litanies, giving Kenobi the sound of another human voice. He was torn between horror and complete admiration—if it was that bad, and the General came out functional but also _kept going_ , then he was a strong man, and Rex respected that.

It was something he had to resort to on a regular basis, but those nights didn’t happen consecutively. Battles cropped up at odd hours, or lasted for days. Whenever he showed up, though, the General didn’t send him away. Rex didn’t mind; he could sleep anywhere. At least this was doing someone else some good.

Kenobi got himself shot, again, and Skywalker gave him a mound of shit for it. The General responded by bouncing a sealed ration bar off of Skywalker’s head, which was definitely worth the price of admission.

“How old are you, sirs?” Cody asked, after Skywalker started eating the ration bar in a show of defiance.

“Thirty,” said Kenobi, which wasn’t much of a surprise, at least until he considered—

“Twenty,” Skywalker said, and then shrugged when every brother in hearing distance turned around to stare at him in surprise. “What?”

Kix leaned past his patient to look at Skywalker. “Sir, you mean to tell me that physically, we’re the same age?”

“Uh, yeah. Why?”

“I think it’s because they can all do math.” Kenobi was smiling, but it wasn’t genuine. How Rex knew that, he had no idea, but it felt like a damned politician’s mask. Like the General really wasn’t happy about where the conversation was going, but was too polite to say anything about it.

“You told us you’ve been his Padawan for over ten years now,” Jesse said, wide-eyed. “That would make General Kenobi twenty at the time, same as you are now.”

“A bit young, isn’t it?” Cody asked, intrigued. “For taking a Padawan, I mean.”

“It’s young for a human to be Knighted, is how I’ve come to understand it,” Attie said.

“Not terribly,” Kenobi protested. “Vos was younger.”

“Yes, but Vos is nuts, sir,” Rex said, to nods of agreement. “No offense.”

“No, no, that’s…that’s pretty accurate, actually,” Kenobi said, looking thoughtful.

“Then why you, sir?” Jesse asked. Rex would have nudged him to be quiet if he’d been close enough. “You did a bang-up job on Skywalker, but…”

“Because no one else would do it.” Skywalker was frowning.

Kenobi seemed to sigh. “Anakin.”

“What? It’s the truth!” Skywalker was shaking his head. “I wasn’t even ten years old yet, and the Council thought I was the most terrifying thing they’d ever seen.”

There was a long moment of tense silence. Then Cody said, “Sir, we all like you a hell of a lot, but I’m sorry: You’re not scary.”

It was a good release of tension, a break that came on a wave of laughter. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell people!” Skywalker proclaimed, throwing his hands up into the air. Kenobi’s smile had shifted and become a real one.

“Not terrifying, but he is a bit crazy,” Kix said.

“Got it directly from his Master,” Rex muttered in a low voice, but both Jedi turned and gave him such identical looks of denial that he started laughing again.

Later, when Commander Tano had joined up and battle raged over Bothawui Prime, all of the brothers agreed without saying a word that the Commander did _not_ need to know that this was actually the second Battle of Bothawui, not the first. None of them wanted a repeat of last time, when Kenobi had apparently set out to prove that Rex was right about who wore the crazy pants in that lineage.

“You are, you know,” Rex said, dabbing at the line of blood on Kenobi’s face. His idiot General had skipped medical and holed up in his quarters with a bottle, instead. “Fucking crazy person.”

Kenobi just sighed. “Someone had to make sure that Anakin didn’t die.”

“I dunno, I think Skywalker was a hell of a lot safer than you were, sir.”

The General took Rex’s hand in a gentle grip and pulled it away from his face. “I promised someone that Anakin Skywalker would be a Jedi Knight. I can’t keep that promise if my Padawan ends up dead before he can be Knighted.”

Rex shook his head and tossed the blood-stained gauze into the bin. “You can’t Knight him, either, if _you’re_ dead. Sir.”

“I suppose not.” Kenobi took a drink of the liquor, which smelled like it came direct from a mechanic’s anti-reg still.

“I know that tone, sir.” Skywalker sounded just the same way when things were about to turn sour. “What’s wrong?”

The General shared alcohol with him before he spoke again. Rex grimaced after swallowing; hells, it really was from Hack’s still.

“I feel like today was just a prelude,” Kenobi said, after emptying his glass.

“Prelude to what, sir?”

“Something worse.” Then Kenobi smiled and changed the subject. “Stop calling me ‘sir’ when we’re off-duty. That’s weird to hear, coming from a friend.”

Friendship…fit, Rex thought. It was a hell of a lot easier to consider the relationship he had with his General a friendship instead of a crush, especially since he was smart enough to know he wasn’t in love with Kenobi—or at least not any more than he loved Skywalker, or his brothers.

“ _Motir ca’tra nau tracinya_.” Rex didn’t know if Kenobi was asleep or not, and was about to launch into the next litany when Kenobi spoke.

“I always liked the war chants,” he murmured, before rolling over and burying his face against Rex’s shoulder.

“Didn’t know you spoke Mando’a,” Rex said. He hadn’t planned to stay through the night cycle, but he wasn’t being tossed out on his ass, either. Sleeping with someone else in the room was a hell of a lot more comfortable than sleeping in his personal berth alone.

“My name is attached to the Mandalore Reconstruction, and still people do not expect me to speak the language.” Kenobi sounded amused.

“Pretty violent thing to like, though, isn’t it? For a Jedi, I mean.”

“If I judged the value of things by how violent they were, I wouldn’t have any friends to speak of,” Kenobi replied. “The litanies are about war, yes, but they’re also about life, about connection.”

Rex had to give him that one. _“Vode an.”_

“That is one hell of a pun right now. A double pun, even.”

He smiled. “Yeah. Guess it is.”

It was a hell of a surprise when he woke up the next morning with a warm, sleeping length of Jedi pressed up against him, and realized he was rock-hard.

Well. That wasn’t exactly a new way to greet the day, but hells, he was _young_. Like most of the men of his generation, Rex had never actually been with anyone—not exactly a lot of time for it. Then there were regs to be concerned with. The General was a commanding officer. Not his direct line of command, what with Skywalker leading the 501 st around, but close enough. There wasn’t a damn thing to be done about it, and that resolve made it a lot easier for Rex to get up and start his day, leaving his General to sleep for another hour.

His General. Gods, he was in such damned trouble.

There was a skirmish that day, but nothing bad. Just a pile of clankers on the ground, but not a brother to speak of. Kix always considered it a good day when he was binding wounds, not overseeing the disposal of corpses.

Rex tapped on Kenobi’s door after his rounds were done. He couldn’t quite give up the midnight shift, especially of late. Too damned wound up. “Hey. Just wanted to make sure you were sleeping, and not out roaming the halls.”

Kenobi was seated in his chair at the room’s terminal, peering at the screen. “I don’t need to sleep every night.”

Rex just looked at him.

Kenobi turned his head and scowled. “You’ve been spending too much time with Anakin.”

“As you say, sir.”

“You keep coming back here. Why?” Kenobi asked, though at least he shut down the terminal first.

“Because I’m friends with an idiot who thinks it’s all right to skimp out on sleep with a war raging,” Rex shot back.

Kenobi stood; it took only two steps for him to be close to Rex. He was trying to figure out if he was about to be shoved out the door when Kenobi reached out and touched his face.

Rex froze, both from surprise and because little gods, he had no idea that someone’s rough, callused fingertips on his cheekbone could feel so damned erotic. That was the word for it—not soothing, not comforting. If this was what sex was supposed to be about, then kriffing hells, sign him up.

Kenobi’s fingers tracked lower, through the hint of bristle starting to show on Rex’s face. He had to swallow twice before he could get words out. “Uh. General.”

“Captain.”

That should not have been a turn-on, Rex thought. That was probably highly inappropriate.

Kenobi’s hand dropped away. There was a weird sensation in Rex’s gut, like a splash of cold water at exactly the wrong time. “I’m sorry,” Kenobi said, and then was out of the room and gone before Rex had quite parsed what was happening.

What the hell?

The 501st went out on assignment with Skywalker after seventh hour the next morning. Rex wasn’t worried; it was supposed to be a short trip. Then it turned into a full ten-day of hell on the ground. When he wasn’t worried about keeping his crazy-ass Commander alive, let alone the rest of his brothers, Rex would think about that moment and kick himself for bringing up rank at just the wrong kriffing time.

Skywalker got winged by a lucky blaster bolt from a shit droid, and then bitched about it the entire time that Kix was patching him up. Sitting still for treatment meant that Skywalker wasn’t with his men. That was among the multitude of reasons why Rex liked Commander Skywalker. He hoped the man kept the 501st when his eventual promotion to Knight and General came up.

When they met back up with the _Negotiator_ , there was fresh battle scarring on the destroyer’s hull. “What the hell,” Skywalker muttered. “I know you hate her name, Master, but try to keep the ship in one piece when I’m gone.”

The General and Cody, along with Eerin and two Generals he didn’t recognize, were waiting in the main hangar to greet them. Everyone looked too serious, even by Jedi standards. “What’s happened?” Skywalker asked.

“Dax Kello,” Kenobi said, and Rex felt a great deal of his exhaustion fall away as if it didn’t exist. Hells, that really explained the look on Cody’s face.

“Him again? Didn’t we kill him?” Skywalker asked.

“Apparently we didn’t do a very good job,” Kenobi returned, his voice clipped. “He’s on his way to Togoria, and as soon as the rest of the 501st is aboard, so are we.” His gaze was like grey-walled durasteel. “He’s not hitting military establishments. He’s going after civilians.”

Skywalker ran his hands through his hair, which was starting to get shaggy. The Commander needed a trim soon, if he wanted to look like a proper Padawan. “Shit. All right. That gives us what, six hours?”

“Seven,” Eerin said.

“Just enough time for a nap, then,” Rex said. “Hello, Commander.”

“Oh, it’s General now, Captain,” Eerin replied, her mouth dropping in her species’ version of a smile. “Have you met the others?”

The other two Jedi were Kalinq and Cerro, two Knight Generals who had picked up nicknames from their own troops in the 616th and the 317th. Clank and Zero weren’t quite as personable with the 501st, but the men who Rex met among the other two battle groups were damned fond of them, and that was enough for him.

Rex had missed most of the Pernellian Campaign, but he knew that this was far worse. Dax Kello was coping with his ejection from the CIS by taking it out on under-defended stations and planets as he tore hell down the line. Kenobi looked grim all the time; Skywalker looked like he wanted to bite something, and nothing organic would volunteer. The second time they came back from a civilian settlement that had been wiped out, Cody kicked his bucket helm across the width of the hangar bay. Nobody called him on it.

By the time they made it to Raku, in the Fossis system, the four battle groups were strung along an entire hyperspace route’s worth of planets. Men were stationed for cleanup efforts at so many places that their core group was down to four companies and the Jedi, and none of the companies were at full strength.

“Intel says he’s holed up down there,” General Zero said. None of them could stop calling Cerro that; even the other Jedi had given in to the inevitable.

“Which means it’s probably a trap.” Skywalker was standing with his arms crossed, looking down at the holomap of Raku’s rocky terrain. “That’s a mess waiting to happen.”

“We can’t _not_ spring this trap,” Kenobi said. His hand was up, two fingers massaging his temple. Headache, then, a bad one if he was giving it away with such an obvious tell. “The casualty list is far too long as it is.”

Eerin was side-eyeing Kenobi, probably just as aware of the tell as Skywalker, Rex, and Cody. “We need to narrow down our potential infiltration points.”

“Scouts, then,” Clank said, his lekku twitching. “I can go—that kind of landscape is what I spent my first few years playing in.”

“Take Mouse’s squad with you, sir,” Cody suggested. “They like playing hide-and-seek.”

They met Clank and Mouse’s squad on the surface four hours later. “Six kliks that way, but I’m starting to think our intel is worthless,” Clank said, while Mouse sat on a rock nearby, putting her rifle back together. Non-clone volunteer, like Commander Rhys, but one insistent that she could work just as well with the brothers as she could with other troops. Half of Rex’s company had silent crushes on the woman’s intense professionalism.

“What’s the problem?” Skywalker asked.

“I think the facility is deserted,” Clank replied. “We were practically knocking on their front door, we scouted so close. I sensed maybe two or three beings, at the most.”

“Abandoned prisoners, most likely.” Eerin’s posture radiated displeasure. “It’s in line with his tactics.”

“Which means we can’t just blow up the complex from a distance.” Zero scrubbed at his mustache. “Well, shit.”

“And the stone outcroppings steer us right to the door in a column,” Kenobi said.

“Traaaaaap,” Skywalker repeated.

“If there are ground forces waiting to spring up on us, I sure as hell can’t find them,” Clank said. “We didn’t find _anything_ , Kenobi.”

“Air strike?” Eerin asked.

“Anti-aircraft turrets at the top of the facility,” Clank said. “If the people left in there were put in place to man the guns, we’d get blown out of the sky on approach.”

“I wouldn’t,” Skywalker muttered.

“Not all of our pilots are as skilled as you,” Kenobi said, chiding and compliment melded together. “I’d rather not lose half of our forces just on the approach.”

“We could split up,” Skywalker said, but Clank and Zero both vetoed the idea. “Obi-Wan?”

“I’m honestly not sure, Anakin.”

In the end, they all took the rocky path to the facility. If it was a Kello stronghold, then it needed to be destroyed from the inside out, not to mention scouting for fresh intel. If there were prisoners, they needed retrieving—sooner rather than later.

If there were just Kello’s people inside, Rex had no problem shooting them.

They didn’t make it, which wasn’t a surprise. The shock was the _method_ in which everything went to shit.

It had to have been a concussion mine, or a series of them. He never quite got around to asking, and he was missing about a minute from before and after detonation. Either way, Rex found himself lying on his side, his ears ringing, his ribs bruised—kriffing hells, he must have bounced off the rock face he was wedged up against. He pulled off his helm to check his ears for bleeding. Just what he needed, another session with the Jedi Healers to get his hearing back—

Gas. Everywhere. Rex jammed his helmet back on in alarm, reaching up underneath the edge to snap the atmospheric seals into place. It was a noxious-looking cloud, puke-green and spreading.

The Jedi didn’t have helms, just those rebreathers, and if they didn’t get to them in time… Hells.

Rex forced himself to his feet, adrenaline overriding pain. He went from one fallen brother to the next, snapping helmet seals into place on anyone still too unconscious to do it for themselves. His ears stopped ringing, and sound started filtering back in as he worked. Small favors.

Rex found Kix with his armor cracked down one side, the edges bloody. Torrent’s medic was down, but not dead. Ugly damned wound, though. He raided Kix’s bag for bacta patches and slapped a line of them down the wound to seal things up. He made sure that there wasn’t any damage to Kix’s helm, or the filtration unit that fed in clean air, and moved on.

Cody appeared out of the mist like a damned wraith and grabbed him by the arm. “Rex,” he growled, and then started coughing. “I can’t find the General. _Any_ of the Generals!”

“Did you suck up that green shit?” Rex demanded, rounding on him.

“I’ll live.” Cody coughed up what sounded like half a lung. “Dammit. Go that way. I’m heading up the opposite side of the corridor.”

“Casualties?”

“Not bad, but I’m still finding buckets to seal. Go,” Cody ordered, and they split up.

Skywalker was the luckiest bastard, Rex thought, when he found the Commander pinned beneath two fallen members of the 212th. He shoved the bodies aside along with his grief. Before he could check for life signs, Skywalker was stirring, though there was telltale blood at his nose, mouth, and ears.

Rex found the man’s rebreather and shoved it onto Skywalker’s face. “Gas, sir,” he said, when Skywalker opened his eyes and looked like he was getting ready to protest. The sick green edge of the cloud was just curling around Skywalker’s legs. At least the Commander hadn’t gotten a lungful of the shit, like Cody had. “Can you stand?”

Skywalker pulled the breather from his mouth long enough to shout, “What?”

Rex winced as his ears protested the sound. Even with the helm’s audio filter, it had been too damn loud. He held his hand in front of his chin, classic shushing gesture, and then thought, as loud as he could: _Concussion missile. Hearing damage. Stop shouting! Gas._

Skywalker put the breather back in place and nodded. _Obi-Wan?_

Rex resisted the urge to twitch. That made two Jedi who’d spoken in his head, now, and it was still an odd sensation. He shook his head, gestured at the bottom of his helmet to indicate the seals, and then pointed at the troops who were still on the ground.

Skywalker gave him a look that did a good job of signaling only partial understanding. Rex took a breath and let it out. He worked with Jedi; he needed to get used to this kriffing telepathy stuff. _Help the others. I’m sure they’re all here somewhere._

Skywalker nodded again and headed off to start sealing helmets. At least half of the men were still on the ground, but Rex thought most of his brothers were unconscious, not dead. He’d only come cross six confirmed bodies so far.

“He’s not here,” Skywalker said about an hour later. The gas had cleared off when the wind picked up, and everyone who was capable of waking up had done so.

“None of them are.” Cody looked grim. “I think we misjudged the trap.”

“They were after the Jedi from the start. They must have missed you—you were pinned, sir,” Rex told the Commander, when he frowned in confusion. “I almost didn’t notice you, myself. Whoever these bastards were, they were in too much of a hurry to take a proper look.”

“We _know_ who they are. They’re Kello’s men.” Skywalker clenched his hands into fists. “We’re not doing this again. I refuse to oversee another Jabiim.”

“We’ll find them, sir,” Cody said. “There’s not a lot of places to hide on this rock.”

“If they’re still on this rock,” Rex had to add.

“They are.” Skywalker lifted his head, as if scenting the breeze. “I’m certain of it.”

Rex and Cody looked at each other. “I’ve got three squads that can move,” Cody said.

Rex nodded. “I’ve got two, and there are four from the 616th and the 317th. Let’s move out.”

“Report in every thirty minutes,” the Commander ordered. “If I don’t hear from you, the rest of us are damned well going to come looking.”

It took hours to make any sort of headway in the search, and the longer it took, the more stressed out the Commander was getting. “I almost feel sorry for Kello, when Skywalker gets ahold of him,” Jesse said.

“I don’t,” Rex said, and then held up his hand to halt the squads when Cody reported in on a different signal.

“Found the nest, sir.”

“Good,” Skywalker replied. “Coordinates?”

Rex cursed when Cody rattled them off. “That’s at least a hundred kliks from our current position. We’ll be there in fifteen.”

“We can’t wait for you, Rex.”

Rex narrowed his eyes. “Sir, yes you can. It’s just you and one squad. The General damned well wouldn’t want you committing suicide.”

“Something’s _wrong!”_ Skywalker retorted. “It’s too quiet!”

“Not if you keep yelling, sir,” Cody said in a mild voice. Skywalker’s laugh was more air than sound, but at least it was better than shouting.

Rex turned around and looked at his squad, composed of a scattered collection of troops from the companies that had flown in. “Hope you boys don’t mind if we break a few speed limits. We’ll be there in ten, Commander.”

“We’ll be waiting, Rex.”

Rex switched off of that comm channel. “You’d better be.”

They had two companies’ worth of men gathered up, once Rex and Cody spent another ten minutes all but sitting on Skywalker, convincing him to wait for firepower. “I don’t want this to be a massacre for us, I want it to be a massacre for _them,_ ” Cody insisted.

“That’s a bit bloodthirsty, Cody,” Skywalker said.

“I need my General back,” Cody growled. “I’m a hell of a lot calmer when there’s someone else here to keep you from doing stupid shit.”

They separated to their invasion points for a three-prong attack. Rex settled with Jesse at his back. The rest of Torrent Company’s able-bodied were strung out behind them, hiding in the rocks on the eastern side of the great ugly duracrete block that Kello had holed up in. Nobody was in perfect condition—Kix was still out of commission and Dice was half-deaf—but they were all ready to do their jobs.

Cody got his attention on a private channel. “Something I wanted to know before Skywalker gives the order to advance.”

“Yeah?”

“Are you sleeping with my General?” Cody asked bluntly.

Rex frowned. “Depends on if you mean sleeping or sex.”

“Hairsplitting bastard. Sex, then.”

“Then the answer’s no. Just sleeping,” Rex said, waving his hand to alert Jesse and Attie when Skywalker marked them at thirty seconds.

“Breakdown?”

Rex double-checked the charge on his rifle. “Yeah. Not bad, but he wouldn’t fucking sleep after Rattatak. He’s doing better, though.”

“I thought so.” Cody sounded gruff. “Got a bad feeling there’s gonna be a resurgence of it after this.”

“You’re a bucket of cheer, you know that, right?” Rex asked, and then Skywalker gave the order. If Cody replied, Rex didn’t hear it over the sound of Dice’s rocket making a big damned hole in the side of the building. “Go!”

They found less resistance inside than had been expected, but that didn’t make Rex feel any better. The place smelled like death, even though he still had the seals engaged on his helm to keep out any other potential gaseous surprises.

 _I shouldn’t be able to smell anything but myself,_ he thought, unnerved. Maybe that was what the Jedi meant when they said they had a bad feeling about something—sensations that made no sense.

His men found the detention block first. They mowed down the opposition and then set up posts on both ends of the corridor. “Start opening those kriffing doors,” Rex ordered, and then shot a droid that got back up. “And make sure that whatever you shoot at stays down!”

Cody’s group arrived before the search teams were halfway down the line. “Anything?”

“Not yet,” Rex said, and then Jesse started shouting for them. “Or you’re just in time.”

Attie stumbled out of the cell and leaned against the opposite wall, chest heaving. “No good, sir,” he said, and Rex’s heart skipped a beat.

“Oh, gods,” Cody whispered. Rex just stared, trying to make his mind believe what his eyes were seeing.

Commander—General Eerin was the only one still recognizable. Zero and Clank hadn’t fared nearly so well. _They’d been Knights longer. They would have been able to hold out longer,_ Rex thought, and swallowed back the sour taste of bile.

“What is—oh.” Rex turned his head; Skywalker was just behind them, staring into the cell, wide-eyed horror on his face. “No.”

“They’re dead, Commander,” Attie said, voice strangled. “For at least three hours, maybe longer. No chance at resuscitation. Rigor’s setting in.”

“Where’s the General?” Cody bit out.

“Haven’t found him yet—” Eel started to say.

“Then open the rest of these doors!”

“Already on it!” Waxer yelled back in response to Cody’s roar. “Torching our way through the lock that’s next in line.”

Skywalker got there first. Waxer pulled the torch free; Jesse gave the door a ferocious kick to break the last bits of metal holding it shut.

All of them went quiet, a hush that felt like a roar in Rex’s ears. Kenobi was strung up just like the others. Just as bloodied. Just as still.

Just as dead.

Cody took off his helm and gave it to Waxer. “They made him listen,” he said, quiet words that shattered the shocked hush. He pointed to a series of notches up where the wall met ceiling, tiny passageways to the other cell that would have allowed sound to pass through. “They made him listen to all of it.”

“Fuck,” Rex whispered, and then pulled off his helm. He didn’t want anything else he had to say getting recorded by the mission log. “Cody.”

Cody glanced over at him, and then shouldered his way past Skywalker, who hadn’t budged since the door opened. “I’m not leaving my General to hang there.”

Rex shoved his helm at Jesse and followed him in. “I’ll help you.”

Kenobi’s eyes were shut, which was a mercy. Rex thought he was going to be haunted by the death glaze in a Mon Cal’s eyes for a long damn time as it was; he didn’t need any more nightmare fuel than the General’s bloodied body was going to give him. Gods damn it all, he was still warm, even through the shredded remains of his tunics. If they’d listened to Skywalker—

“Fucking hells,” Cody muttered, his hands on the metal cuffs that were cinched around Kenobi’s arms. “Skywalker, I need your help, sir.”

There wasn’t a response. Rex looked back at the doorway. Most of the brothers had ditched their helms, standing in awkward, shell-shocked clusters. Skywalker’s jaw was clenched, and there were storm clouds in his eyes, grief and rage battling for dominance.

“Sir. Commander!” Cody barked, which finally jolted Skywalker into meeting his eyes. “These are welded shut,” Cody said in a quieter voice. “We need your lightsaber to get them off.”

Skywalker blinked a few times, swallowed, and nodded. “Hold him. I don’t want to miss.”

“Wouldn’t matter much,” Rex couldn’t help but say.

“He’s not dead,” Skywalker said, and ignited his lightsaber.

Rex stared. He had not just heard—

“Sir, if you’re joking right now, I swear I will shoot you, commanding officer or not,” Cody said, frowning.

“Not joking.” Skywalker took out the left cuff with his lightsaber. Careful as he was, there was still a red line on Kenobi’s skin from the blade’s passage. “It’s a hibernation trance.”

“Fuck,” Rex said again, wide-eyed. He’d heard of that, sure, but he thought it would have been a little bit…a bit more _obvious_.

He made damn sure his hand was steady as he held Kenobi’s right arm for the second lightsaber cut. The cuff broke apart; the General’s body came down in a boneless slump, supported on one side by Rex and the other by Cody. They lowered him gently down to the ground, keeping him upright and off the dirty duracrete floor. Waxer turned around and started shouting for medical officers they didn’t currently have.

“That’s why he isn’t…why he’s not like the others,” Rex said. Despite his first impression, Kenobi was a hell of a lot more intact than the other Jedi. “Kello thought they’d killed him already.”

“I think so.” Skywalker knelt down with them, cupping the General’s face with both hands. “I just hope he picked an easy trigger. Obi-Wan?” Skywalker bit his lip when there was no reaction. “Master?”

Kenobi’s hand suddenly clamped down on Rex’s shoulder, tight enough that his armor cracked. His chest heaved, and his breath came out on a choked scream.

“No, no, hey, it’s okay, it’s me.” Skywalker didn’t let go of Kenobi’s face. “Obi-Wan!”

The General’s eyes flickered open. The whites of his eyes were as blood-spotted as his skin. “Ani,” he said in a hoarse whisper.

Skywalker grinned like a sun coming out after a cloudburst. “Hey. You’re going to be okay,” he said, which made Rex and Cody exchange glances again. The General was breathing in gurgling rasps. This was far, far better than dead, but it wasn’t that great, either.

Kenobi decided to prove the point by passing out before he could say anything else. “Dammit!” Skywalker looked up at Cody. “Your team secured medical.”

“Yeah, not that it was much to speak of.” Cody hesitated. “There…there was a stasis pod, sir.”

Skywalker froze; Rex stared at his brother. “You know standard regs are that we don’t put Jedi in those things.”

“I know the damned regs,” Cody replied, furious. “I also know that we’ve got no medics on their feet right now, and the General isn’t going to survive the flight back to the destroyer.”

“This isn’t even shipboard treatable. We don’t have the supplies for it.” Skywalker’s eyes hardened. “Do it.”

Eel, Mouse, and Longshot brought in the pod within minutes. Rex eyed the sleek black device and tried not to dwell on the fact that it looked like a coffin. “You know how to use that thing, sir?”

“Not a clue,” Skywalker said, which didn’t do a whole lot to make the pod look less coffin-like.

“I’ve got it,” Cody said, leaving Rex to keep an eye on their General. “Zed showed me once.”

When the pod opened, Rex felt a hand grip his arm. He looked down to find Kenobi staring up at him. “It’s all right, sir. We’re getting you out of here.”

_Polis Massa._

Rex almost dismissed it as a stray thought until the name repeated itself. _General?_

Kenobi’s lips twitched in what was probably supposed to be a smile. _Captain._

Polis Massa. That was a medical station in neutral space.

Kello wasn’t here. The station had no defenses.

Kenobi was still looking at Rex, somehow managing to convey assent even though his expression didn’t flicker. Shit.

“Commander!” he yelled, getting Skywalker’s attention. “We’ve got another problem!”

Skywalker listened, his mouth settling down into a thin-lipped frown. “I can’t—we’re not— _dammit_. The moment he’s secured, I have to go fucking tell someone to—” Skywalker shoved his hands into his hair. “Shit.” He came over and knelt down next to Kenobi. “Master. Can you trance down again? Would it help?”

The General’s eyes flickered over to the stasis pod. Cody had convinced it to open; it looked more kriffing coffin-like than ever.

 _No,_ Kenobi said, loud enough that Skywalker winced and Cody squeezed his eyes shut before rubbing at his head. Some of the other brothers were, too. Only Mouse seemed not to have noticed. _It—the way they work, it isn’t… It would kill me._

Skywalker drew in a tense breath. “Yeah, I thought as much. Anyone got a pain—”

_Also not a good idea._

Skywalker glared at Kenobi. “You know, I am really not comfortable with the idea that I’m about to be torturing you, so I could really use some encouragement, here.”

Kenobi’s jaw worked. _Just make it a short—a short trip. I’ll cope, Padawan._

They got him situated without much difficulty. Skywalker rested his hand on Kenobi’s face. “I’ll be there with you when you wake up. I promise.”

Kenobi didn’t respond. Rex suspected he was out again, probably the pain from being moved. He wanted to make the same promise, and couldn’t. Cody looked ready to spit nails at the idea that they were going to be in orbit when the General awoke. They were all so damned used to _being there_ for each other, and the war had only been on for six months.

Still better than dead, Rex thought, meeting Cody’s eyes. He knew without words that his brother agreed.

Rex was in his berth on the _Negotiator_ , stripping his rifle apart, when there was a knock on the door. Cody came in without waiting for an answer. “The Commander says that Muln pulled the short straw, and is taking the 114th to Polis Massa.”

“You don’t sound like a man who’s pissed off about that,” Rex said, frowning when he came across slag in the charge connection ports. Commissioning a new rifle might be easier than filing that clean. “Wasn’t that one of the Jedi Generals participating in the Pernellian Campaign?”

“Yeah.” Rex looked up to find a wide, merciless grin on Cody’s face. “Muln is also close friends with the General, and he was with Eerin, too. He’s not happy about Kello at all.”

“I hope he takes Kello to pieces, Jedi morals be damned.”

Rex was in the firing range a few days later when Cody approached again, hauling Turf’s sniper rifle over his shoulder. “Before you ask, I don’t have anything new from the Temple.”

Rex was filing slag off of those damned contact points again, and nearly tossed the metal file in frustration. “It’s been five damned days. What are they doing down there?”

“Uh, I can come back,” Skywalker said, startling them both when he came in through the observation entrance.

“Sir?” Rex tried not to hold his breath. Skywalker was looking shell-shocked again.

“What—oh. Oh! Dammit, I’m sorry. He’s fine,” Skywalker said, and Cody’s shoulders dropped into a relieved slump.

Rex put down the file and breathed out. “Damned good to finally hear that, sir.”

“Where the hell is your braid, sir?” Cody asked, staring at the Commander’s shoulder.

“Uh. Yes. Okay. That was the thing I was coming to see Rex about, but since you’re here, Cody, I can tell you, too.” Skywalker looked back and forth between them. “I’ve been Knighted.”

There was a beat of silence. “Well, it’s about time,” Rex said, a wide grin on his face. “Congratulations, sir.”

“There a promotion coming with that Knighthood, sir?” Cody asked, pleased.

“Sure was. Now you’ve got two crazy Generals to worry about.” Skywalker finally started to smile. “They asked if I wanted a different command. It was really hard not to laugh them off. I already _have_ the men I want at my back when the war ends.”

Rex thought he did a good job of hiding his relief at that bit of news. “The 501st will be glad to hear that, too, sir.”

“However, you’re also stuck without a High General for a while. The Healers have grounded Obi-Wan for a month, so when we ship out in a ten-day, it’ll be just me.”

“Oh, thank the Force for that,” Cody said, giving Skywalker a frank look. “That’s long overdue.”

“Yeah, it probably was, but it took the entire Council practically sitting on him to make him agree to it in the first place.” Skywalker hesitated. “I am really, really going to need your help, guys. Command of the 501st is one thing. Worrying about all of you—that’s going to be different.”

Rex smiled. “We’re kind of used to doing that anyway, General.”

“I figured.” Anakin grinned. “Congratulations on your promotion, Commander.”

“Aw, shit,” Rex said, his smile wilting away. Cody laughed at him.

“Relax, I’m not gonna make you paint the stripes on your armor, you big baby,” Skywalker said, bright-eyed and smiling. The bastard. “But the legion needs a commander, and you’re it.”

“Congratulations, brother,” Cody said with a smarmy grin.

“And congratulations on your promotion too, Cody,” Skywalker said, and Cody looked at him in surprise. “You’ve been running the whole of the 212th for long enough, might as well have the rank to go with it, Marshal Commander.”

“What did my General have to say about that, General?” Cody asked, and then made a face. “Well, that’s going to take some getting used to.”

“He said you both deserved it.” Skywalker gave them a sharp nod. “And he didn’t mean that in the asshole way, either. He meant every word.”

“Sir,” Rex and Cod said in the same breath.

Skywalker smiled again. “Enjoy your leave, gentlemen. I know I will.”

When they finally heard the hiss-thunk of the bulkhead door sealing, Cody chuckled. “If he’s able to walk when he comes back in ten days, I will be _very_ surprised.”

“You think the Senator manages to get any work done whenever we drop him off?”

Rex argued with himself for three straight days before saying “Hell with it,” and taking a shuttle down to the Jedi Temple. It wasn’t as if he was not allowed to be there; the army belonged to the Order.

He had an officer’s uniform, one he’d managed to avoid wearing almost since it was issued. He hated it. It itched and had no tactical value whatsoever.

“Commander Rex,” he muttered as he pinned the new rank insignia in place, and then shook his head. It didn’t even _sound_ right. Maybe he could convince everyone to keep calling him Captain. It wasn’t like the 501 st and the 212th wouldn’t know his actual rank.

Rex gave some serious thought to wearing his armor, but even he knew that was a bit much. Visiting someone in full battle gear would be ludicrous. He tried to console himself with the fact that at least he could still carry a side arm, but it really wasn’t the same.

He had to confirm his identity twice, which was irritating, but the Temple registry gave him the listing for Kenobi’s quarters. Skywalker’s name was still attached. He guessed there wasn’t a lot of concern about finding your own place when there was a war raging, or else Skywalker just wasn’t all that concerned about having a solo berth.

He kept forgetting how massive the Temple was. There had been one tour he’d participated in, since it was expected of officers, at least, to be familiar with the Temple’s public areas. It still took longer than he expected to get to the east tower via lifts and moving walkways. No wonder the Jedi were in such good shape, if making it to your own commissary meant a two klik walk.

By the time he made it to the right door, he was a nervous wreck. He was a kriffing soldier, and visiting a friend made him want to hide under a ledge. Maybe their flash training really was missing a few important social points. He was out of uniform, even if he technically wasn’t, visiting a commanding officer who he really should not be visiting because—

Shit, he was panicking. Some Commander. No wonder he liked his old rank better.

Rex lifted his chin and squared his shoulders. The hell with this. He was not doing a damned thing wrong, inappropriate, or against regs—anyone’s regs. He pressed the door chime and waited.

It was a long, stomach-churning minute before the door opened. The General must have been sleeping—his hair was a tangled mess, and there was an imprinted line going up his stubble-covered cheek from whatever he was sleeping on. He was also wearing the least clothing that Rex had ever seen, loose sleep pants that rode almost too low on the hip to be decent.

“Rex.” Kenobi looked surprised. “Sorry, thought you were Anakin.”

“The Commander—I mean, the General’s been by?” Rex asked. His General still looked bruised, but it was a vast improvement over the bloody mess he’d helped to shove into a stasis pod.

“Sporadically,” Kenobi said, and then seemed to recall that they were still standing in the doorway. “Come in, please.”

Rex took a steadying breath as Kenobi retreated, and walked into the General’s personal quarters. This was different from invading the man’s berth aboard ship. That was a bolt-hole. This was a home.

“Do you like tea?” Kenobi asked, while Rex looked around, trying not to stare. It was a nice place. Really minimalist, but he liked the lack of clutter—as long as he ignored the trail of droid innards, parts, and bits that seemed to be spilling out of the room on the right.

He knew the answer, but asked anyway. “Skywalker’s, right?” Skywalker accumulated detritus if he sat still for longer than an hour, let alone stashed away in his own berth.

“Yes. Tea?”

Rex shook his head. “No damned idea, sir.”

“Then experimentation is called for,” Kenobi said. Rex looked to his left, where there was a well-lit full kitchen, not just a prep area.

“My last bit of experimentation involved eating live insects,” Rex said, trying not to appear like he loathed the idea of further culinary excursions. He was happy with caff and hot food. Skywalker had just shrugged and called the insects “extra protein.” It had been a disconcerting moment, realizing that Rex and his brothers were the spoiled bastards, and their CO was really…really not.

“This is much less wriggly, I promise.”

Rex cast about for topics of conversation and seized upon the first detail he’d noticed. “You shaved the beard off.”

“No, the Healers did. Better seals for the breathing apparatus if you’re going into a bacta tank,” Kenobi replied.

“You look a lot younger without it,” Rex said, and winced. That could easily sound insulting.

“Hence the beard.” Kenobi brought him a heavy caff mug. At some point while Rex had been staring around like a tourist, he’d found a shirt to put on. “Hard to be taken seriously if everyone thinks that you’re the Padawan instead of the Master.”

“I can’t really see anyone making that kind of mistake.”

Kenobi had a wry smile on his face. “Anakin has been taller than I am for quite a while now.”

The liquid inside the mug was just as black as caff, but the smell was more fragrant than caff’s rich bite. He waited, watching as Kenobi blew across the liquid’s surface before sipping. Rex copied him, dubious.

He swallowed and made a face. “Gods, I thought caff was bitter. I feel like your tea just tried to crawl into my teeth and put in fabricated housing.”

“Straight black is the strongest sort of tea, and not necessarily to everyone’s tastes,” Kenobi explained. “Cream or sugar are standard alternatives, but I don’t suggest the cream—neutralizes the tannic acid.”

“Oh, it’s acidic, too. Good to know,” Rex groused, unimpressed.

“Black might not be your preference. There are greens, whites, and red tea, as well.” Kenobi tilted his head. “And a blue one, too. I always wanted to try that one.”

“Why haven’t you?”

Kenobi shrugged, sipping that gods-awful bitter tea. “It’s a Separatist world now. Tea is not worth being labeled a traitor.”

Rex grimaced. “Yeah.” He gave the tea in his hands a disgruntled look until Kenobi laughed, led him into the kitchen, and introduced him to the sugar bowl. It took about a quarter of the container to make the damned tea drinkable.

“You’ve turned it into syrup. I’ve created a monster,” Kenobi said, but he had a warm smile on his face, one that Rex rarely saw. That smile was for Skywalker, usually; kids, definitely. Sometimes Rex had earned one after making sure his General had a few hours’ sleep.

His General. Dammit, he needed to break that habit now that Skywalker was promoted.

He followed Kenobi back to the sitting area. A blanket was tossed over one end of the couch. It wasn’t hard to guess that the General had been sleeping there, and not in a bed. He had an intense moment of feeling desperately out of place before sitting down on the couch next to Kenobi at the Jedi’s pointed invitation.

“What brings you here?”

“How are you? Honestly, not the lies you try to foist off on your Council,” Rex clarified as Kenobi opened his mouth to answer.

The General was affronted. “I wasn’t going to, I was—I’m fine, Rex.”

Rex glanced away. “Sir.”

“Are we on duty right now? I’m severely underdressed, if that’s the case.”

When Rex turned back, Kenobi looked…sad? Frustrated? He had no idea. Skywalker was a lot easier to read, some days. “You scared the hell out of us. We all thought you were dead.”

“Anakin didn’t say anything?” Kenobi asked, surprised.

“Not at first. He was…he’d stalled out on us.”

“Ah.” Kenobi leaned back against the couch in a comfortable slump. “Anakin was having a critical argument with himself, one I’m glad that he managed to sort through on his own.”

“Enough for a Knighthood, huh?” Kenobi nodded. “What are you going to do without a Padawan?”

For a moment, there was a terrifyingly blank look on the General’s face. Then it vanished when Kenobi smiled. “Not much different from what I’ve already been doing, just with less influence.”

“You really think Skywalker will listen to you any less?” Rex asked.

Kenobi lifted one hand into the air, fingers splayed. As far as body language went, that one’s meaning was a mystery. “Anakin has always been insistent on determining his own course of action.”

“A bit, if he thinks he’s right. But he usually _is_ right, is the thing. The few times I’ve seen him push when he shouldn’t have? Yeah, that wasn’t good, and sometimes I had to talk him down from doing something stupid,” Rex said. Kenobi was listening closely, even if he wasn’t looking Rex in the face. “But that’s the act of someone who thinks he has something to prove. You Knighted him, General. I don’t think Skywalker’s going to worry so much now about needing to prove anything to anyone.”

Kenobi didn’t reply at first. Then he said, “Obi-Wan.”

“What?”

“That’s my name. I’d like it if you used it.” Kenobi still wasn’t looking at him, which was strange. If Rex didn’t know any better, he’d say the man was nervous.

“Obi-Wan,” Rex tried, and the word on his tongue felt almost as weird as trying to call himself Commander. “What do you think would happen if I called you that on duty?”

Kenobi finally looked at him, a mischievous glimmer in his eyes. “I would much prefer to have a commanding officer whose head has _not_ just exploded from sheer outrage.”

“Good point.”

He tried to drink the tea, but the sweetness was getting more intense as it cooled. “You could have warned me.”

“Lesson learned,” Kenobi countered. “You’re not just here for my health, Rex. You definitely aren’t here for the tea. What is it?”

“I wanted to…” Rex put down the mug and rested his hands on the itchy dull gray fabric of his trousers. He could face down lasers and droidekas; he could face this man and ask him a damned question.

Rex turned so that he was looking at Kenobi. “I wanted to know what this was,” he said, and put his hand on Kenobi’s face, fingertips to cheekbone, the same way Kenobi had done to him.

Kenobi held very still. The expression on his face had turned strange again, something that was trying hard to be neutral and failing badly. “Something that I did not have the right to ask of you.”

It didn’t take long for Rex to puzzle that out. Fraternization was bad, but doubly frowned upon if it was the higher-ranked officer initiating things with those of lesser rank. Hard to say no to your CO.

Rex lowered his hand and swallowed when his mouth felt too dry. “What if I asked it of you, instead?”

“Rex.” Kenobi seemed to be struggling with words almost as much as he was. “You don’t have to—”

“I fucking well know _that_ ,” Rex snapped, irritated. “I’m a soldier, not an idiot.” The general was staring at him in surprise. “ _You_ don’t have to, either. I mean, I’ve—never been with anyone. Ever. But I wouldn’t mind if it was you.”

Kenobi blew out a long breath, and quite a bit of that neutral expression went with it. “Well. I won’t say that I don’t want to, because yes, I _really_ do. But your timing is awful.”

“Not the first time I’ve been told that,” Rex said, unconcerned. Awful timing didn’t mean ‘No.’ “Why?”

“Despite the rather miraculous qualities of bacta? I was dying eight days ago. It does take a while for the body to recover, ah, stamina, from that sort of injury.” Kenobi blushing was honestly one of the most shocking things Rex had ever seen. “I couldn’t…ah…”

“It’s fine,” Rex blurted, deciding to save the man from having to spell it out.

“Is it?” Kenobi studied him in a way that was far less General and a hell of a lot more Jedi. “I’m on mandatory leave for the next three and a half weeks. If you still feel that way when we meet again, then we’ll…we’ll talk.”

“All right.” Rex thought maybe he should leave things at that, but then suspicion made him ask. “Have you been sleeping?”

Kenobi didn’t dodge the question. “I’ve been trying to.”

“Is it working?”

The General smiled. “Only when it’s daylight.”

“In that case, I’m heading out so you can do exactly that.” Rex stood up. “If it gets bad, you know my comm. Use it.” He glared at Kenobi. “Or at least go see a shrink, or whatever you lot call them.”

“Mind Healer,” Kenobi said, but he was nodding. “I’m going to have to for this. I can’t—I really cannot go out there this fucking angry.”

“And Rattatak.”

“No.” Kenobi’s eyes went from blue to flat gray in the space of a heartbeat. “I need to be out there with all of you, and if I pull out Rattatak…that’s more than a month, Rex. No one can afford that.”

Rex watched Kenobi closely, but saw none of the old tremors that the planet’s name usually invoked. “Good enough, I guess,” he admitted. “Comm. Use it if you need it.”

Kenobi smiled. “I will.”

Their month out alone with Skywalker was as exciting as it was extremely stressful. Skywalker had great ideas, but they were usually also mind-boggling in terms of how improbable they were to carry out. What kept both battalions at his back was their own genetic heritage for violent, joyful mayhem, and the fact that they pulled a victory, every time.

Cody and Rex still ended up commiserating over a bottle of Hack’s gods-awful brew. They wanted Kenobi back, if only to temper Skywalker’s insanity. A brother needed a normal droid shoot-out, now and then.

“I think Skywalker’s got a bet with himself on how long it takes to get General Windu to have an aneurism,” Rex said.

Cody snorted. “Surprised he hasn’t managed that already.”

Kenobi announced his return by blowing a vulture off of Cody’s ass during the worst space battle of the Kiffu Defense. “Thank you, sir!” Cody said. “Good to have you back.”

“Excellent! How many are with you, Master?” Skywalker asked.

“Oh, it’s just me.” Kenobi sounded unruffled and unconcerned about the fact that he’d just flown into a damned swarm of Sep droid fighters. “I didn’t want to make it unfair to them.”

Rex smiled. That was their General back, all right, and it turned the tide of the fight against the Seps. Skywalker got to be the big, loud, noisy distraction, while Kenobi brought up a squadron behind the Sep capital ships and quietly obliterated everything in his path.

By the time he got back, Skywalker and Kenobi were already together. Kenobi was reaching up to ruffle Skywalker’s hair. “Look at this mop you’ve grown out.”

“Yeah, well, you chopped yours off, so I guess it balances out.” Skywalker grinned. “You look good.”

“You have been breaking everything in twelve systems,” Kenobi countered. “I’m ecstatic that you’re doing so well for yourself.”

“I had a lot of help.” Anakin stepped back, giving Rex a clear look at their returned General. He’d grown the beard back in, but he really had cut his hair a lot shorter than Rex had ever seen it. Instead of copper that reached past his shoulders, it was trimmed up almost military short, except for that long fringe in the front.

Rex glanced over at Cody, who was sauntering his way over with a good portion of the 7th Sky. Most of Torrent’s available brothers were coming to join Rex. Perfect timing.

“Well, well. If it isn’t _Tehkemiren Shus’huk_ , back with us again,” Cody said, smirking.

“If it isn’t the _what?_ ” Kenobi asked, wide-eyed.

 _“Tehkemiren Shus’huk,”_ Rex repeated, and looked innocent when Kenobi turned his head to glare at him. “We took a vote, sir.”

“Figured that one was a hell of a lot more accurate than some of the other options, sir,” Waxer added, grinning.

“What are they calling you?” Skywalker asked.

Kenobi put his face in his hands. “The Walking Disaster.”

Skywalker burst out laughing. “You wanted a different nickname, Master.”

“As long as this one doesn’t wind up plastered on the outside of a destroyer, I’ll be happy,” Kenobi said, smiling at the assembled brothers. “I mean that. Not on the side of a destroyer.”

“Yes, sir,” Cody agreed, and held out his hand. Kenobi clasped his arm in the more traditional Mando’a way, which made a lot of Rex’s brothers nod in approval.

 _You are such a kriffing diplomat,_ Rex thought fondly. He’d just won over every new member of both companies without saying a damned word.

The Kiffu Defense ended, if only by virtue of them pushing the Seps back beyond the borders of the system. There were two weeks straight of back-and-forth, offensive to defensive to offensive again, before there was any sort of battle lull to speak of.

“Hells, that is enough of that shit,” Jesse muttered, almost dragging his rifle down the corridor as Rex followed behind him. “I don’t want to leave my bunk for a week.”

Rex refused to admit that he wanted the same thing, even though he felt just as wrecked. “We’ve got confirmed twenty hours down. Let everyone else know, will you? I need to check on the other companies and report in.”

“Yeah, got it covered. Who are we putting in Fall’s position, anyway?” Jesse asked, and then yawned.

“I have no idea,” Rex said, twinging at the idea of putting _anyone_ into that fifth sergeant’s position in Torrent. He was starting to think the damned thing was cursed. “Who’s the luckiest bastard in the company?”

“Stop trying to demote me,” Jesse shot back, and disappeared into the berth he shared with Attie. Rex shook his head and continued on.

He made damned sure everyone in his company was racked out before slowly working his way through the legion’s berths. Technically it wasn’t his job to oversee everyone—he had captains and lieutenants for that—but after two weeks of harsh fighting, it was a way to find out who was alive, who was in medical…and to count empty bunks. It wasn’t as bad as he’d feared, but there were still too many.

Skywalker found him just as he’d finished his rounds. “How’re we doing?”

“We need to request about three hundred new troops,” Rex said bluntly. “That still doesn’t put us at full capacity, but I refuse to flood the ranks with more Shinies than we can handle at a time.”

His General sighed. “Yeah, good call. You compose the order and I’ll sign off on it, but tomorrow, okay? You need to rest.”

“So do you, sir,” Rex said. Skywalker just nodded, tossed him a careless salute, and headed off. At least he had one general who was sensible enough to sleep when he needed it.

Speaking of.

He didn’t get an answer when he knocked on Kenobi’s door, but the privacy light wasn’t on. He stepped inside and found Kenobi asleep in his chair, slumped over the terminal. Rex caught a startling glimpse of circles forming under the General’s eyes, as well as the line of pale skin from where the v of his tunics parted.

“Well, hells,” Rex muttered. He hesitated for only a moment before stripping down to his blacks, then he nudged Kenobi enough to get him up and into bed. He was pretty sure that the man didn’t even wake up for the process, even more so when Kenobi curled up around him, tossed both arm and leg over Rex, and refused to budge.

 _I have become a General’s stuffed Wookiee,_ Rex thought, smiling, and was out in the next breath.

Everyone got ten hours out of the original promised twenty, and then the damned klaxon blared. Rex started awake and fell off the bunk when he forgot that he wasn’t alone in his own berth. “Shit!”

Kenobi sat bolt upright, rubbed his face with both hands, and then swore viciously and with such feeling that Rex had to grin. “Good morning, sir.”

“Fuck mornings and fuck the Separatists and fuck everything else, too,” Kenobi snarled, raising one hand as his lightsaber hilt smacked into his palm. “Let’s go kill something.”

“You should really consider tea before heading into battle, sir,” Rex said, buckling his armor into place. “Might make you a bit more civil.”

“Fuck civil. Explosions. Everywhere.”

Rex nodded, checking the charge on his rifle and then making sure he had a spare cartridge in his belt. “I’m sure Skywalker is arranging for explosions as we speak.”

Kenobi put his hand on Rex’s shoulder before they headed out. “I was curious. Are you still wanting to have that conversation?”

“Yeah. I am.” Rex felt a tight flare of warmth in his chest. “But after the explosions, sir.”

Kenobi grinned at him. “Good thinking,” he said, a feral light in his eyes. If Rattatak had unleashed something in the Jedi Master, then Raku had pushed it out even further. Rex didn’t mind; when it came down to it, he knew which side Kenobi was on, and it wasn’t the damned Seps.

The problem with that decision was that technically, the explosions didn’t stop for another three damned weeks. The Sep ambush pushed the fleet straight into a campaign that led them into the Christoph System in the Outer Rim Territories. Christophsis left Rex with a bad taste in his mouth, a sour churn in his gut, and a sergeant in the brig. Kriffing hells, he knew that damned fifth position was cursed.

Rex holed up in his berth the moment he was clear to do so, sitting on his bunk to stare at the opposite wall. He had an entire squad that was a shambles, and he wasn’t sure what in the hell to do about it. Dice was plying Chopper, Gus, Jester, Punch, and Sketch with the latest batch from Hack’s still, but Rex wasn’t in the mood to drink.

When he was tracked down, it was Skywalker and Kenobi both coming to see him. Rex made to stand up, but Kenobi waved him down before he could get to his feet. “It’s fine, Rex.”

Rex stilled. That was a pointed reminder about being off-duty. He just hadn’t expected Skywalker to join them. He tried to say “Obi-Wan,” he really did, but it still came out as a terse “Sir.”

Kenobi sat down in the room’s only chair, while Skywalker leaned against the wall. “We wanted to see how you were,” Skywalker said.

Rex glanced back and forth between his Generals. “I’m fine, sir.”

“Not sir, not right now,” Skywalker insisted. “You and Cody had to deal with that shit on your own, and he’s your brother. That can’t have been easy.”

Rex scowled. “Is Cody getting this treatment, too?”

“Cody is on the firing range, destroying everything that it’s legal to destroy,” Kenobi said, grimacing. “I’ll talk to him when he’s done firing, or when his rifle overheats. Whichever comes first.”

Rex held out for a full minute. “I’m pissed off because Slick wasn’t lying. We _are_ slaves, all of us.”

Skywalker’s head lowered, his eyes flashing with suppressed anger. Kenobi just nodded sadly. “Yes. You are.”

“What the hell, sir,” Rex bit out. “It’s not something a lot of us haven’t figured out on our own, but we’re also soldiers. I will follow your orders and I won’t regret a damned moment of it, but what if we wanted something different? We can’t leave. We’d be betraying our commanding officers and ourselves if we did it.” Just like Slick.

Skywalker’s posture went tight and unhappy. “Believe me, Rex, I understand.”

Kenobi glanced at him, concern in his eyes, and then turned back to Rex. “Cloned sentients have no legal rights in the Republic as private citizens. The Council has been trying to push for legal standing for all of you beyond the confines of the army, but the Senate…”

For a brief moment, Kenobi looked infuriated, and then he buried the emotion. “Right now, keeping you and your brothers in the army is the only damned way we know of to keep you safe from exploitation. If any of you went AWOL, or defected, or even just flat-out wanted to leave, there would be nothing stopping anyone from doing whatever the hell they wanted to you.”

“Murder, scientific experiments, torture, abuse.” Skywalker crossed his arms. “There would be no legal repercussions whatsoever.”

Rex nodded. He wasn’t kriffing happy about any of it, but knowing that the Jedi were trying to help, that they weren’t just meat clankers in the eyes of the Order as a whole, was reassuring. “What’s going to happen to Slick?”

“If he had just tried to defect, I would throw him in the brig for a week and then talk to him long enough to figure out if we could get your sergeant back,” Kenobi said. “But his actions cost us lives, not to mention the sheer amount of property damage. That’s imprisonment under the law, whether or not he was a clone.”

“Also, he tried to kill you, and I’m kind of pissed off about that,” Skywalker muttered.

“Yeah.” Rex let his head thump back against the wall. “Will he be safe?”

“As anyone could be, in a military prison,” Kenobi said. “Slick is well-trained, Rex. He’ll be able to defend himself if anyone is stupid enough to try anything. He hasn’t lost his status in the military, so yes, there damned well _would_ be consequences if he was harmed.”

Rex nodded again. That was the best he could hope for, all things considered. “Thank you, sirs.”

Skywalker huffed a sigh and straightened. “I’ve got to go oversee Slick’s transfer. Do you want to be there, Rex?”

Rex thought about it. His overwhelming response, at the moment, was to knock out most of Slick’s teeth. “Nah, better not. I don’t want to give him that kind of validation right now.”

“Fair enough. Take care, Rex. I’ll see you in the morning,” Skywalker said, and headed out.

When the door shut, Kenobi abandoned the chair and sat down on the bunk next to him. “So. Talking.”

“Now?”

Kenobi gave him a wry look. “Given how things have been lately, I thought I’d give you the opportunity. We might not have it again for a while. Your choice on if you take it, of course.”

“I, uh.” Rex frowned. “I don’t actually know what sort of conversation this should be, beyond, ‘Yes, please,’ and ‘I’ve had all my shots.’”

Kenobi laughed. “Thank goodness; so have I.”

“Then what else is there, sir?”

Kenobi looked at him from the corner of his eye. “You might want to not call me that right now, Rex. You’re going to wind up creating one hell of a fetish.”

Rex grinned at him. “What, you like that?”

“When it’s coming from you? Apparently,” Kenobi admitted. “I guess what’s important here is…Rex, I hope you’re not looking for someone well-versed in this.”

“Hadn’t given it that much thought, really,” Rex said. He hadn’t been thinking about Kenobi’s experience, just his own lack. “Does it matter?”

Kenobi hesitated, and then raised his hand, four fingers up. “That’s why.”

“So you’ve only been with four people. So what?” He noticed the look on Kenobi’s face. “Not four people.” Head shake. “Four times, total.” Kenobi nodded. “Are people around you blind, or are you just really good at fending them off?”

Kenobi grimaced. “Thanks, I think? Probably the latter, though. I’m not—I don’t really do...casual. Just people I feel close to.”

“How short is that list?” Rex asked, starting to feel uncomfortable.

“It’s short,” Kenobi said, and then lifted one shoulder. “Add in sexual compatibility, and that list becomes very short indeed.”

“How short?” Rex repeated.

“Five.” Kenobi swallowed. “And one of them is no longer possible. Dead,” he explained, when Rex looked curious. Then Kenobi lowered his head, expression grieved. “No. Dammit. I keep forgetting. Two of them are, now. Not that it was ever going to happen again with the other, but…”

Damned war, Rex thought. “Look, all of that is fine with me as long as you’re not looking for a marriage. I like you, but I’d probably shoot you if I had to live with you.”

Obi-Wan smiled at him. Much better.

“So, who’s my competition?”

“It’s not a—you’re teasing me,” Kenobi said, when he noticed the expression on Rex’s face.

“A bit, yeah,” Rex admitted, grinning.

Kenobi shook his head. “As long as you remember your discretion: Muln and Bail Organa.”

Rex sat up. “No kriffing way.”

Kenobi raised an eyebrow. “You do know what kriffing means, yes?”

“Course I do.”

“Then why not just say it?” Kenobi asked.

“I like kriffing,” Rex said, and then scowled the moment the words came out of his mouth. “Did you really ask me that question just to get me to say that?”

Obi-Wan’s smile was wide-eyed innocence, the smug bastard. “Would I do that?”

“You’re telling me I’m on the short list with a Jedi General and a Prince. Am I allowed to be smug about that?” Kenobi snorted out another surprised laugh. “Now what?”

“Now, I have to go. There are things I must do, even without Slick’s complication,” Kenobi said, getting to his feet and raising his arms in a stretch. “You, however…” Kenobi hesitated and looked at him. “You’re welcome to come to my quarters at your usual time.”

“No one’s going to think that…weird, are they?” Rex hadn’t made a secret of helping the General with his battle breakdown. It just wasn’t openly discussed, either, just like it wasn’t openly discussed when the other brothers needed help. It was something you did, not something you gossiped about. What Kenobi was inviting him over for was a hell of a bit different, though.

“Not at all. Everyone is familiar with the fact that you spend the second half of the night cycle on General-sitting duty.” Kenobi smiled. “Cody does the same for Anakin, when it’s needed.”

“Does he?” Rex asked, surprised. Cody had never mentioned it.

Then again, Skywalker was a hell of a lot more twitchy about his privacy.

“Anakin and I love each other very much, but there are some things that…” Kenobi frowned. “I was his Master for ten years. Some days that means that yes, we are the first each of us turns to if something has gone wrong. Other days, it’s good to unburden yourself to someone who is _not_ your teacher, or your CO.”

“Now that, I get,” Rex said. “I’ll…uh.” Shit, there were the kriffing nerves again. “See you later.”

“Sure,” Kenobi said, and left with a smile on his face that was pleased and just shy of smug.

Rex scrubbed his face with his hands. Kriffing hells. If a klaxon interrupted this night cycle, he was going to track down every Sep General in existence just to shoot them for the inconvenience.

He still did his midnight patrol of the ship, which took longer than usual. Too many of his brothers were awake, spending time alone or sitting in small groups. All of them were trying to come to terms with what Slick had done. Defying orders was one thing. Killing your own brothers was anathema.

“You finally get tired of target practice?” he asked when he saw Cody.

Cody looked worn down to the bone. “Yeah. I’m off duty for the next twenty-six unless the Seps do something stupid. You?”

Rex considered the events of the day, and to his surprise, found he wasn’t near as torn up about it as he might have been. He had the best damned Generals in the whole of the Republic military. “You know, I think I’m good. I’ll keep an eye on the 212th tomorrow, make sure that _they_ don’t do something stupid.”

Cody smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re a good man, Rex.”

 _Yeah, a good man who is breaking so many regs right now,_ Rex thought when he reached the General’s door. He stood there for a moment, forcing himself to consider every single aspect of this. There was going to be an emotional attachment coming out of this, one that might trip him up in the field.

Then he snorted. Right. He’d been emotionally attached to his Generals for months now, and it hadn’t affected his performance in the slightest. If anything, he’d been a bit more precise about dealing with potential threats.

When Kenobi told him to come in, Rex found him seated at his terminal. He’s stripped off the partial armor he and Skywalker had been wearing on their commanders’ insistence, and was wearing just a shirt and trousers. He’d seen the man’s bare feet before, but something about the situation made it seem like...like confirmation.

Kenobi wasn’t scowling at the screen, but there was a frown line between his eyebrows. Not dire news, then, but not joyful, either. “Sir.”

“Almost done.” It was another minute before Kenobi snapped the terminal closed. “Fucking paperwork.”

“Fuels the military,” Rex quipped.

“It fuels bureaucracy,” Kenobi countered. He stood up from his chair and stepped closer to Rex, who was trying not to hold his breath. He’d just watched the General persona _and_ the Jedi mask fall away, and what was underneath was a quiet, gentle-eyed focus that was centered on Rex and nothing else.

“Hold still,” Kenobi said. While it was an instruction, Rex could also hear the request in the words, so he nodded. Kenobi proceeded to take his armor off with a sort of reverent efficiency that was…

All right then, apparently he really could get that hard, that fast.

When his armor was off and he was down to blacks, Rex felt awkwardly underdressed in a way that made no sense. “I have no idea what the hell I should be doing,” he confessed.

Kenobi smiled. “What do you _want_ to do?”

“That easy, huh?” Rex asked.

“Unless I say, ‘No, stop that, you terrible fiend,’ then yes.”

Rex started chuckling. “All right. Sir.”

Kenobi’s eyes fluttered shut. “Oh, a fast learner,” he said, as Rex leaned in and kissed him. That was sort of odd, at first, because he was just as inexperienced on that front. It was like smooth warmth, countered by the sharper bristle of the hair above Kenobi’s upper lip.

Kenobi opened his mouth, and then it wasn’t just warm, it was wet in a way that sent a jolt of electricity through Rex’s limbs. There was a nudge against his lips—oh, tongue. Fuck, but he was never going to think about this man’s tongue in the same way ever again.

Rex pulled back when he started shaking. “Is that normal?”

Kenobi took his hands and held them at chest level, doing nothing more than running his thumbs over the backs of Rex’s hands. “A bit. Nerves and excitement blending together. There’s nothing wrong with that as long as you’re not doing anything that you don’t want to do.”

He swallowed. “Can I touch you?”

Rex was staring Kenobi in the eyes, so he could see it when heat kindled there, revealing sparks of green. “Oh, absolutely. Anywhere you like.”

“Anywhere?”

“There is not a part of my body that would reject the touch of another, Captain,” Kenobi said in a soft voice.

Rex gasped. Damned inappropriate response, and he didn’t care. “That is kinky, sir.”

“A bit.” Kenobi stepped back so that he could pull his shirt over his head, tossing it over the back of the chair.

Without thinking about it, Rex reached out, his fingers tracing the red, angry scarring down the center of Kenobi’s chest. “What the hell is that from?”

“Grievous and a lightsaber. It’s much better than it was; with repeat bacta treatments, it might eventually go away.”

“And this one?” Rex asked, finding a burn scar on his upper left arm. He ran his fingers over it. The skin there was slick, not rough like the edges of the scar suggested.

“That one was Dooku and a lightsaber, the first Battle of Geonosis,” Kenobi said. “There’s a match for it on my leg. Same fight.”

Rex looked up at him. “And you’re wondering why we call you _Tehkemiren Shus’huk.”_

Kenobi was smiling. “It isn’t the sort of name that will strike fear into the hearts of my enemies.”

Rex snorted. “I’ve seen you fight. You can do that on your own, sir.”

“Do I?” Kenobi asked, his voice soft. Rex swallowed, hard, as Kenobi walked forward and gently pushed him against the wall. Then he was being kissed again, Kenobi’s warm hand sliding up his neck and cradling the back of his head.

He gasped into Kenobi’s mouth when the man pressed the full length of his body against him. There was a hard, rigid length in Kenobi’s trousers that was snugged right up against his prick. Fuck, but there were some damned nice advantages to being a similar height.

Kenobi chuckled, his lips whispering against the stubble on Rex’s cheek. “Yes, there are.”

“Proximity again?” he asked, and then groaned when the General rocked his hips. Gods, but that felt good.

“Yes.” Kenobi raised Rex’s left arm, lacing their hands together as the kissing resumed. Rex willingly opened his mouth for more of what seemed to be mutual exploration. If someone had asked him yesterday how it was possible for two people to manage tongues and kissing, he wouldn’t have been able to answer them. Now he just wasn’t sure if there was a language in existence that would describe it.

“Not in Basic.” Kenobi let go of his hand, his fingers running down the length of Rex’s arm until he found the snaps for removing the top half of his blacks. Rex’s eyes rolled up as Kenobi murmured words against his skin while he worked at getting Rex topless. _“Gecht’en atha yi dracuu t’pa’amour.”_

Pa’amour. Rex thought he knew that one. “Love?”

“Wrong inflection.” Kenobi licked his neck, which made Rex shudder. Holy gods. “ _T’pa’amour_ means ‘to love.’”

“What’s the—” Rex forgot to finish the question. Teeth. Teeth on his ear. He was going to wind up coming in his damned trousers at this rate.

Kenobi gave a low, throaty laugh. “Oh, you are going to be the death of me, you absolutely gorgeous man.”

Rex opened his eyes, once he realized he’d shut them. No one had ever called him gorgeous, and it wasn’t a term he would use. He was too rough for that, not elegant at all.

“Eye of the beholder, then,” Kenobi granted him. “Help me take this fucking thing off of you, it’s thwarting me.”

Rex smiled. “Takes practice,” he said, and found the other set of snaps before pulling it up over his head to take it off. “See?”

“Sorcery,” Kenobi muttered, and then put his hands on Rex’s chest. “Oh, lovely.” There was a striking difference in the color of their skin. Kenobi was almost literally white in comparison.

“Don’t you Jedi know what sunlight is?” Rex teased, running his hands down Kenobi’s arms. The General had freckles; it was godsdamn cute. “Or is it taboo?”

“Not taboo, just a lack of leisure time,” Kenobi said. This time when the man pressed in close, it was skin to skin. Kenobi sighed when Rex put his hands on his back.

“Anywhere, right?” Rex asked. When Kenobi nodded, he ran his hands down Kenobi’s back and over the curve of his ass, pulling him in close. Kenobi groaned low in his throat, almost a growl of pleasure that made Rex’s hips jerk in reaction.

“Bed,” Kenobi said, punctuating the request with another kiss. “Bed, bed, bed—there is a bunk right there, I do not want to have to climb you like a tree to get off.”

Rex laughed. “All right, then. Sir.”

“Nnnghh.” Kenobi’s hands tightened on his shoulders. _“Captain.”_

Rex shivered. Yes, that was probably still inappropriate, but damn, he really did not care right now. “You fight dirty.”

Kenobi took that as a blatant challenge. He slid his hands in between them and cupped Rex’s groin, then slid his palm along the line of his prick. “You have no idea.”

Rex had to clench his jaw, because otherwise he was going off right then. “Are you trying to make me come in my pants?”

“I will if you want me to,” Kenobi replied, grinning at him. “Bed.”

“Fine, fine. Bossy damned General,” Rex muttered, grinning as he pushed Kenobi over onto the bunk. He spent about a half-second debating before Kenobi reached out, pulled Rex on top of him, and started sucking on his lower lip.

That had definitely not been covered by their single sex-ed lecture. Fuck, that was amazing. Rex ground down without really thinking about it; Kenobi arched up into it, head thrown back and exposing the pale column of his throat. Rex just stared, mesmerized. Holy gods, now _that_ was gorgeous.

Kenobi smiled, reached up, and put his hand on Rex’s face. “My turn to ask: Can I touch you?”

“That’s kind of a stupid question right now,” Rex replied.

“Limits?”

Rex didn’t have to think about that for very long. “None. Sir.”

Kenobi shuddered beneath him, and then hissed out a delighted breath. “Excellent,” he whispered, and then used his unoccupied hand to undo the snaps on the fly of his blacks.

When Kenobi’s warm hand wrapped around his prick in a tight grip, Rex forgot everything else he was doing. It was the first time he’d been touched there by anything other than his own hand. He opened his mouth, but his response didn’t resemble anything close to Basic.

It must have at least been a happy sound. Kenobi gasped and thrust up against Rex’s hip before pulling him back down and sealing their mouths together. The man’s tongue probed at his lips just before teeth nipped at his lower lip.

He didn’t know if it was the steady up-and-down of Kenobi’s hand on him or the bite, but it was more than enough to set him off. It was definitely the _best_ orgasm of his life, pulsing spasms that hadn’t even ended when there was a flush of complete euphoria. Rex almost shouted before he clamped his jaw down, the sound reduced to a low whine. You didn’t shout in a berth unless you wanted immediate, nosy company.

“That would be…inconvenient,” Kenobi said, panting for breath. Rex opened his eyes and looked down at him to find Kenobi staring up at him, skin flushed, his eyes half-lidded and sated.

“But, I didn’t—” Rex paused. His words were slurred like a drunk’s.

Kenobi shook his head before pulling Rex down to lie snug against him, skin to skin with a mess in between. “Proximity,” Kenobi reminded him, recovering his breath a lot faster than Rex did. “Also, I think I really fucking needed that.”

“Then…I am really happy to oblige. Sir.” Rex grinned when Kenobi twitched and growled. He wrapped his arms around the man and rolled them over so that Kenobi was resting on top. Jedi or not, Rex weighed more.

“Mm, bedroom courtesy,” Kenobi said in a low, pleased voice. “Excellent.”

“Is penetration on the menu?” Rex asked, when he thought he could manage it without slurring.

Kenobi chuckled. “You make it sound like this was just an appetizer.”

“Nah, not that.” Not if this sort of lassitude was any indication.

“It is, but it’s entirely up to you,” Kenobi said, lifting his head just enough to plant a brief kiss on Rex’s jaw. “Tonight, or any other time.”

Rex smiled. Confirmation that this was going to happen again was fabulous.

“Oh, definitely again,” Kenobi said. “Whenever you wish, if I’m not otherwise occupied.”

“Then…then not tonight,” Rex said, after thinking about it. “I’d like to…” Keep this separate. He wanted to remember all of it, and he didn’t want to be rushed. It was a lot closer to sixth hour now than it was to midnight.

Kenobi sighed, but it was pleasure, not frustration. “Wise man.”

“What did that mean, what you said earlier?” Rex asked, running his hands up and down the General’s back.

 _“Gecht’en atha yi dracuu t’pa’amour,”_ Kenobi said in a drowsy murmur. “There’s no literal translation; part of it’s a declarative. The closest translation is, ‘The dance that leads to love.’”

Rex grinned. “Why didn’t they just call it tongue-fucking?”

Kenobi laughed so hard, Rex was worried he was going to rupture something. “Thanks. Now I will never be able to say those words again with a straight face.”

“I live to serve, sir.”

Rex didn’t have to watch out for the 212th the next day. Someone had called in a minor miracle, and for the first time since leave ended, they had a full twenty-six hours of quiet.

“Shit, I have no idea what to do with the rest of the day,” Attie said, when noon hit and there wasn’t even a blip in the sector to worry about. “I don’t know what to tell my captains or my sergeants.”

Jesse grinned. “We could be pricks and order them to march the ship for the cycle.”

“Oh, good, you’re trying to convince your men to shoot you,” Dice said, rubbing at his ear. The Healers said he had his hearing back, but Dice still complained about high-pitched sounds and ringing bells. “What about you, Eel?”

“Not a damned clue,” Eel said, resting his chin on his hands. “I don’t want to be responsible today, I want to blow everything off and sleep until morning.”

“Waxer?”

Ghost Company’s captain was sitting with his head pillowed on his arms, but he glanced up immediately and proved that he was paying attention. It should have been Lieutenant Wooley, but someone had nailed him in the ass during the last round of fighting. Wooley was still in medical, complaining at full volume.

“Sir, I’m with Eel. Sleeping the rest of the damned day sounds great. Half of us are still beat to shit from the extension of the Kiffu Defense,” Waxer said.

Rex thought about it. He couldn’t stomach the idea of just doing nothing, not when they were all still technically on duty, but if Waxer was ready to join Eel in revolt-napping, then so were a lot of other brothers. “Let’s balance it out. I want both battalions to put in six hours on getting their gear up to snuff. If it’s broken, fix it or replace it. Restock your kits, especially if it’s medical. The supplies are in, so we should damned well have them when we need them on the ground. If your armor’s taken a hit, switch it out, even if it doesn’t look damaged. Once the six hours are up, everyone can do whatever the hell they want, so long as they’re ready to be soldiers again at sixth hour in the morning.”

Maybe his lieutenants were conspiring. His captains all but shoved Rex away when he came to check on each company. “Follow your own advice, sir. Your armor is blackened in sections,” Sax said, grinning. “We’ve got this, Commander.”

Rex made a face. “That still sounds wrong. Captain.”

“A captain in charge of an entire legion, huh?”

Rex shrugged. “Sure, why not? Everyone who needs to know already does.”

“Everyone will think you’re too big for your britches, sir,” Sax told him.

“My britches fit just fine, thanks.”

Sax was right about his armor. Rex took it off, hung it up to inspect it, and honestly wondered how the back panels had kept him from dying three times over. He didn’t even remember taking two of those shots.

When the six hours were up, Rex stowed his gear, face-planted onto his bunk, and passed out until his chrono blared at him for midnight rounds. The ship was quiet, and he didn’t see evidence of fire, debris, or anything broken. If the men had unwound, they’d done it professionally and cleaned up the mess afterwards.

Even if the day had been kind, checking on his Generals was deep-set habit. “Sir,” he said to Anakin, when he found the man sitting cross-legged on the floor of his berth, fiddling with an electrical panel that probably came out of his own fighter.

“Hi, Rex. Have a nice day?”

“No one shot at me. I’m almost disappointed,” he said, and Skywalker grinned. “The 501st is re-kitted and ready to go the moment you need us, sir.”

Skywalker nodded. “Commander,” he said, smirking.

“Asshole,” Rex shot back. “Sir.”

Skywalker laughed and waved him off. “Good night, Rex.”

“Good night, sir.” One general down, one to go.

“Hey,” Rex said, stepping inside after there was a terse “Come in” in response to his knock. “Just thought I’d check in…” He trailed off. Kenobi was seated at his terminal, scowling at a blank screen. “What’s wrong?” he asked, thinking, _I hope it’s not more dead Jedi._

“It’s not…” Kenobi turned away from the screen and rubbed his forehead with both hands. “It’s not bad news, per se, it’s just—what good is it to sit on the Council if they don’t fucking _listen?_ ”

“I can go,” Rex offered, but Kenobi shook his head.

“No, no. You need to hear this. Forewarned is forearmed. They’re sending Anakin an apprentice.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Rex stared at the General. “They’re sending Skywalker a _Padawan?_ ”

Kenobi nodded in resignation. “That they are.”

“He’s only been a Knight and General for two months.” Rex frowned. “I guess that doesn’t matter as much, it being war time.”

“No, not as much as it once would have.”

“Why’d you argue against it, sir?” Rex asked.

“There is a difference between choosing a Padawan and being assigned one. A Choosing is often Force-led and Force-blessed. An assigned student—there’s no guarantee it will be a good match.” Kenobi shook his head. “We’ll just have to make the best of it.”

Rex raised an eyebrow. “Sir, I love my commanding officer a hell of a lot, but if you tell Skywalker this, he’s going to bolt.”

“I know.” Obi-Wan smiled. “We’d have to dig him out.”

“Plan?”

“Oh, I’m going to lie through my teeth and tell him the Padawan’s for me,” Kenobi said.   
“That way, by the time they arrive and is actually standing there, Anakin can’t panic and hide without losing face.”

Rex grinned. “Sir, you’re evil.”

Kenobi nodded in easy acceptance. “Only when it’s called for.”

“They,” Rex repeated. “Binary, neutral-gendered, tri-gender, agender, no gender—what kind of new commander are we getting?”

“Now that, Yoda wouldn’t tell me.” Kenobi looked amused. “He was probably afraid I’d go find the Padawan and convince them this was a terrible idea.”

“Is it actually a terrible idea?” Rex didn’t want to say anything negative about Jedi affairs, but he was a bit concerned about someone inexperienced joining the ranks. He’d seen the stats, and the Padawan body count was frighteningly high.

 _All the Jedi losses were high,_ Rex thought, and then shoved that unwelcome truth aside. He could only keep one set of Jedi alive at a time.

“It might be, but I have to confess, I’ve been too busy thinking of it in terms of revenge.” Kenobi’s grin was wide, but full of humor, not fire.

“Thought you lot didn’t do revenge.”

“Theoretically,” Kenobi said. “But seeing my dear Padawan deal with a student of his own, at the same age I was? I confess I’m looking forward to seeing him flail.”

Rex smiled. “Still evil, sir.”

When Ahsoka Tano joined them, three days later, Rex almost panicked. Kriffing hells, the Jedi Council had lost their damned minds. They’d sent them a _kid_.

Three weeks later, the Commander was such an entrenched part of the team that Rex couldn’t really conceive of going into a fight without her.

When Tano was ejected from the Jedi Order near the end of the war, Rex had to spend an entire week talking all of Torrent and wide swaths of the 501st out of mutinying.

He tried not to think about what things would have been like if he hadn’t.

The Outer Rim Sieges didn’t let up, not even for the Commander’s funeral. Afterwards, it just kept getting worse. They were all run down and beat to shit, and the fifteen minute naps every day or so was just not kriffing enough to make up for the sleep deprivation. Rex was pretty sure that his Generals were keeping both companies upright with the Force. Only Tuft mentioned hallucinations, and he just thought they were pretty—for given values of giant field mice, anyway.

They were into the seventh month of the Sieges when Rex heard a garbled command in his comm. He was tapping the device, trying to get a repeat, when Kenobi yelled for them to take cover. After that, he only ever recalled the event as a single flash in which everything turned upside down.

Rex woke up feeling like there was a rock sitting on his chest. He was lying down with a fucking mask on his face. Cody was sitting next to him, looking like he’d tried to walk into a blender and changed his mind at the last second. There was a sheen of bacta on his brother’s face, working to heal wounds and to keep Cody from walking around with more scars than he already had.

Cody looked…fuck, if Rex had to classify that expression, he’d call it sad fury. Basic was godsawful sometimes for good descriptors.

“Hey,” he said, which hurt. It shouldn’t have fucking hurt to talk.

Cody jerked upright in surprise before looking down at him. “Hey, you bastard,” he said, and then gripped Rex’s hand—he thought so, anyway. The motion fit, but the pressure on his hand felt faint and faraway.

“Don’t look…s’damned…mopey,” Rex said, more of a slur than solid words. There was a swimming sensation in his limbs, the feel of floating while also being too heavy. Good drugs, then. “What’s…y’problem? I’m fine.”

Cody was shaking his head. “No, you’re—you’re hurt pretty bad, you damned idiot.”

That would definitely explain a lot about the feel of that rock weighing him down. “W’happened?”

“I shouldn’t—”

“Tell me,” Rex ordered, and then grimaced when it made his chest hurt. “Asshole.”

“You don’t remember?”

Rex thought about it. There was a split-second of memory, the ground and sky inverting, accompanied by a deafening roar, but that was all. “Not enough of it.”

“It was friendly fire,” Cody said in a low, angry voice. “There was supposed to be a sub-orbital bombing run on one of the Sep bases, but someone got the coordinates wrong.”

Rex stared at him. “How bad?”

“Rex—”

“How. Fucking. Bad?”

Cody hesitated. “Torrent’s gone, Rex. So is most of Ghost.”

Rex felt a terrible upwelling of nausea, along with a cold spike in his limbs. “No.”

“Yeah.” Cody scrubbed his face with both hands, his eyes not quite dry. “Six survivors for Torrent. Twenty for Ghost.”

“We lost—” Rex swallowed, his eyes burning. “Fuck, Cody.” He couldn’t process that. He just couldn’t…oh, gods.

He felt another terrible spike of cold. “Th’Generals?”

“Skywalker’s got a few broken bones, scrapes, and burns, but he’s fine. Kenobi got thrown clear when the first hit came down on Ghost. For once, my bastard General came out with the least amount of damage of all of us.”

“Cody. Did we—did I—” Rex knew he was stumbling.

Cody shook his head. “This isn’t on us, Rex. We didn’t…it wasn’t our mistake. Hells, most of us didn’t hear the General’s first bellow to find cover. If you hadn’t repeated it, I don’t think the rest of us would be here.”

Rex must have slipped under again, from the drugs or his injuries. He woke up with a transport ceiling overhead, and a warm, tingling sensation in his chest that made the rock feel like it weighed less.

Kenobi was sitting next to him, eyes closed. It was his hand on Rex’s chest, creating that warmth. Force healing. “Hey.”

“Shh,” Kenobi responded, brow furrowing. There was dried blood on his face around his nose and mouth, but Cody was right—he looked fine, otherwise, as long as you ignored the obvious exhaustion.

The words repeated themselves in Rex’s head. _Torrent’s gone._ “Dammit,” he whispered, and this time when his eyes burned, he let the tears fall. If he didn’t grieve now for all those lost—two hundred sixty brothers in one terrible blow—then he might not get another chance. The Sieges were brutal for eating up all the moments a man had. Meals had been difficult to arrange, let alone anything else.

Kenobi opened his eyes, but that was almost frightening. There was a faded, lost look in his General’s eyes.

Then he shook off most of it and looked down at him. “Rex.”

“Doing?” Rex asked, eyes flickering down to indicate his chest.

Kenobi’s smile was faint, but real. “Making sure you survive the transit flight to Kamino.”

Rex felt the blood leave his face. “What? No, I can recover here—” He was not leaving his Generals out in this hellish region of space. No kriffing way.

Kenobi shook his head, drew in a shaky breath. “No. No, you really can’t. Our Healers are strapped. Regardless, this is at least a month of recovery, Rex. Maybe two.”

Gods fucking damn it. Rex clenched his jaw, furious. He hoped Cody shot whoever had fucked up those coordinates, because if he didn’t, it was the first damned thing Rex was going to do when he got back on his feet.

Kenobi put his hand on Rex’s head, a gentle caress of fingers and palm that soothed some of his anger. “Don’t rush your recovery. We need you, but we need you at one hundred percent, not any less.”

“S’that an order, General?”

Kenobi glanced back and forth before leaning down and kissing him. Rex had a brief, panicked thought about observation and regs, and then he stopped fucking caring. His best company was dead and he was probably dying. A kiss was nothing in light of that.

Kenobi pulled back, but his hand did not leave off stroking his head. “This is my order,” he said in a low voice. “Survive. Heal. Anakin needs you, and I fucking well want to see you again, Commander.”

Rex scowled at him. “Had t’go and ruin it, didn’t you, sir?”

Kenobi smiled. “It means that I know you’re paying attention, Captain.”

“Obi-Wan.”

Kenobi looked up at the sound of Skywalker’s voice. “Anakin.”

“They need you outside. I think things are about to start winding up again, and I…I’d like to…”

“Of course, Anakin.” Obi-Wan gave him one last look. “Orders, Captain.”

Rex smiled. “Sir.”

Skywalker took the seat Kenobi vacated. “I did not just see what I thought I saw, because nope, I cannot handle that right now,” he said, but he was grinning. “I don’t want to see it again later, either. I have to work with you guys, and there are terrible mental images going on.”

“Sir,” Rex repeated, feeling a flush of warmth instead of cold. Unofficial approval from his General was kind of nice. “You’d better not…end this war…without me.”

Skywalker’s eyes went too-bright, the blue enhanced by moisture. “Aw, c’mon. You’d like having free time.”

Rex eyed him. “Kidding, right?”

“Yeah, I don’t think any of us know what free time is anymore,” Skywalker admitted, just as one of his brothers called out, “One minute, General, and then we’ve got to go.”

“Okay.” Skywalker ran his hands through his hair. “Get better and get your ass back out here,” he whispered. “I need you around to keep me from doing stupid shit.”

Rex swallowed and tried clearing his throat. He wanted the next part to be clear. “You’ll be fine, sir. Listen. Put Appo in charge of the legion for now. He’s a complete asshole, but he’s good at his job.”

Skywalker nodded. “Yeah, he is. I guess…there really aren’t a lot of other choices at this point, are they?”

“Not anymore.” Rex sighed. “You stay alive, General.”

“Sure. I’ll see you soon, Rex.” Anakin squeezed Rex’s hand, flesh to flesh instead of flesh to leather. “Try to enjoy the trip home, huh?”

Rex nodded. “Sir,” he said, and watched Skywalker walk away until he couldn’t see him anymore. The ship lifted off the moment the echo of boots on durasteel quieted, and Rex shut his eyes.

It was sort of funny. Two Jedi strong in the Force, and yet neither had realized that it would be the last time Rex would ever see them.

**Author's Note:**

> “But Flamethrower! How can Ahsoka be in this fic when you had her die in OtherWhen?” 
> 
> Well, that’s because I made an assumption about TCW back when it was still in its first season, and that assumption was gloriously proven wrong. I refuse to retcon that scene in OtherWhen III; I hope the explanation I’ve woven in here makes up for it. <3


End file.
